]]>ROME — A Canadian and two Italians who were kidnapped in southern Libya by armed men in September were freed unharmed and brought to Italy in the early hours of Saturday, Italian authorities said.

Italian Premier Matteo Renzi expressed thanks to the Libyan authorities and security forces for their role in liberating the men, technicians who were involved in projects at an airport.

“Today is a moment of relief and joy that I would like to share with the families of our technicians,” Renzi said.

The ministry identified the Italians as Danilo Calonego and Bruno Cacace and the Canadian citizen of Italian origin as Frank Poccia.

Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said the two Italians had not been mistreated during their captivity and were in good health. He did not comment on the state of the Canadian citizen.

Authorities said they were liberated during the night and brought to Italy on a special flight early on Saturday.

The men were kidnapped on Sept. 19 by armed and masked men who blocked their vehicle in Ghat, a city in southwestern Libya in the Sahara desert near the border with Algeria.

A number of criminal and extremist groups operate in the area, but it wasn’t immediately clear which group was involved in this case or what the motive was.

ANSA news agency said they are all technicians involved in projects at the airport in Ghat. The Italians were employed by an Italian construction company. It was not immediately clear whether the Canadian worked for the same company or another one.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/two-kidnapped-italians-one-canadian-freed-in-libya/feed/1Canadian is among three people taken hostage in Libyahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadian-is-among-three-people-taken-hostage-in-libya/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadian-is-among-three-people-taken-hostage-in-libya/#respondSun, 25 Sep 2016 15:56:04 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=928459Global Affairs says kidnapping took place earlier this week

]]>Ottawa has confirmed that a Canadian is among three people taken hostage in Libya earlier this week.

In a statement Sunday, Global Affairs spokesman Michael O’Shaughnessy says the Canadian government is “diligently pursuing all appropriate channels to obtain more information about this troubling incident.”

He says the government will not comment further or release any information that may compromise efforts to secure the hostages’ release or endanger the safety of Canadian citizens.

Earlier in the week, a Libyan official said authorities were investigating the abduction of three foreigners working for a maintenance company near the border with Algeria.

Hassan Osman Eissa from the Ghat municipal council told The Associated Press on Thursday that the abductors are not al-Qaida members, as some reports stated, but rather “a local group of outlaws.”

The three foreigners seized — two Italians and one Canadian — were held at gunpoint Monday along the highway linking the southwestern cities of Ghat and Ubari.

Eissa said a team of five Italian investigators have arrived in the town where the Italians and Canadian were abducted.

Libyan forces allied with the U.N.-backed government fire weapons during a battle with IS fighters in Sirte, Libya, July 21, 2016. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

It wasn’t on the same asinine level of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo op, the infamous premature victory shot that came to define Bush’s Middle East mess, but when Canada’s then-foreign affairs minister John Baird blazed into Benghazi, Libya, in 2011 and signed a bomb with “Free Libya, Democracy,” it came awfully close. NATO forces had been told not to sign ordinances because it was viewed as arrogant and crass. “Politicians should sign peace treaties, not bombs,” one senior NATO officer on the mission told me recently. Baird didn’t care. This was his first war as foreign affairs minister and he was literally going to put his signature on it. A Canadian general, Charlie Bouchard, led the NATO mission. Canada was at the sharp end and Baird was all in. “The one thing we can say categorically is that they [the rebels] wouldn’t be any worse than Col. Gadhafi,” Baird declared, as if the number of dead civilians was a legitimate way to judge the success of a new government, just as long as it wasn’t “worse than Gadhafi.” Even by that chilling standard, Baird was epically wrong.

It got worse. The gory civil war that followed the NATO mission fertilized the country with an infestation of jihadists, including ISIS. The U.S. and the U.K. are back at it, running hundreds of bombing sorties to contain them. This week the severely crippled UN-backed Libyan government in Tripoli lost control of virtually all key oil terminals to the forces of Gen. Khalifa Haftar. Oil production is down to 200,000 barrels a day, from 1.6 million before 2011. The UN head of the support mission in Libya, Martin Kobler, did what the UN usually does when it is powerless. He expressed “grave concern over the fighting.” In five years, NATO bombs have transformed into UN blanks. To use a non-technical phrase, Libya is now a yard sale of horrors.

I bring all this up because the lessons of Libya are relevant as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau goes to the United Nations this week, where he may announce long-awaited details of Canada’s new UN peacekeeping operation. Up to now it’s been a mystery mission and there’s concern that any new operation will fall into the same traps NATO fell into in Libya. Canada has promised 600 troops and 150 police officers to some UN mission, likely in Africa, but no one knows where or when they will go. I asked the Global Affairs department for details and they responded like students working on a class project. “The Government of Canada is doing its homework to see how and where Canada can responsibly contribute to ongoing peace and security in the world.” The defence minister, a former solider, candidly admits the mission will likely require the use of deadly force. In UN parlance, that’s called a Chapter 7 mission, but any Canadian who remembers Rwanda or Bosnia knows what that means in plain talk: a dangerous combat mission.

You could fill one of Canada’s giant Globemaster airlift planes with speculation as to where Canada will send its troops. Mali, a desperately unstable place where offshoots of al-Qaeda are based, is frequently mentioned; 68 peacekeepers have been killed there since 2013. According to one source, this would be too dangerous. Another real possibility is Central African Republic, which has been plagued by a three-year civil war. The UN mission there is treacherous and seemingly without end, but there is room to reinforce the existing team. It’s not hard to find conflicts in Africa that need help. On a purely humanitarian basis, it’s a noble impulse. That doesn’t mean it’s strategic, winnable, or even practical. Sectarian violence, greed for resources and ethnic war don’t function according to neat grids and clean lines. That can’t paralyze Canada from acting, but it can’t be dismissed either. In the business of combat there is an old saying: “easy in, hard out”—it’s always simple to justify sending troops into a situation, but almost impossible to have them leave. It’s better known as the “Pottery Barn rule,” a phrase connected to former U.S. general Colin Powell. Once you break it, you bought it.“You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,” Powell told Bush before the invasion of Iraq. “You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You’ll own it all.”

In Libya, NATO forces broke it, but didn’t buy it. They bolted. “NATO did what the mission asked us to do,” says Charlie Bouchard, now retired. “When it came to pass the puck back to the UN, there was no one to pass the puck to.” He’s right. “Canada, alongside its partners, failed to properly plan for the day after the 2011 intervention in Libya,” says Alex Wilner, at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. “While some of our allies—the U.S., Britain, Italy and France, chief among them—have seen fit to militarily re-engage in hope of primarily beating back ISIS, Canada has played a different hand, focusing on political stability and global security.”

Earlier this month, Stéphane Dion announced the last of Libya’s chemical weapons have been removed from the country, to be destroyed. Canada contributed $22 million to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to achieve that goal over the last four years. Is that enough, given the role we played in destabilizing Libya? Hardly. Still, there is little chance Canada’s new UN mission will include boots on the ground in Libya.

Back in August of 2011 I interviewed John Baird and he assured me then that the conflict was “quickly coming to an end.” He looked so certain, but clearly he had no idea what he was talking about. Soldiers don’t lose wars. Politicians do. You never see them bleed, though—they go on to take jobs at law firms and banks—but years later the stains spread. This next mission in Africa will follow the failures in Libya, Rwanda and Somalia. Whatever we break, this time, we will have to buy.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/a-word-of-caution-for-justin-trudeau-at-the-united-nations/feed/6The Return: Searching for a father in Libyahttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-return-searching-for-a-father-in-libya/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-return-searching-for-a-father-in-libya/#respondSat, 30 Jul 2016 15:35:17 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=906913Hisham Matar learns of his father's fate, and the fate of Libya, in this effective personal chronicle

Abu Salim is a top security prison in Tripoli, where over 1000 prisoners were killed in 1996, in what people remember as the “Abu Salim prison massacre.” (Lorenzo Moscia/archivolatino/Red/Redux)

THE RETURN
Hisham Matar

Of the numberless outrages committed by the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, the massacre at Abu Salim prison stands out by dint of sheer scale and savagery. On June 29, 1996, inmates of the notorious facility in Tripoli — most of them political prisoners — were herded into cellblock courtyards, where guards and soldiers fired on them from above. The shooters spent three hours executing 1,270 men, leaving the bodies to rot before burial. Then, weeks later, guards exhumed the bones, ground them up and dumped the powdered remains into the Mediterranean.

For Hisham Matar, the Man Booker-nominated novelist, this atrocity is the focal point of a dreadful quest. The writer, who spent part of his childhood in Libya, has agonized since he was young over the fate of his father, a Libyan political dissident who fled with his family to Egypt when Hisham was nine. Even in Cairo, though, Jaballa Matar wasn’t safe. In March 1990, through the collaboration of the Mubarak government, he was abducted and whisked away to Tripoli. Matar had grown resigned over the years to the likelihood his father’s body lay among the piles at Abu Salim, but in 2008, his hopes rose anew: a survivor of the Gadhafi dungeon system reported seeing Jaballa just six years earlier.

This memoir chronicles Matar’s pursuit of that clue and the truth about his father’s fate. It follows his return to Libya during the interregnum between Gadhafi’s overthrow in August 2011 and the country’s subsequent spiral into sectarian chaos — a moment, as he puts it, “burning brightly with hope for the future.” Beneath Matar’s personal search lies a parallel quest for the true Libya, a nation that, apart from a 24-year period of independence following the Second World War, has spent the better part of a millennium under the thumb of occupiers and tyrants. Matar — who shares his father’s dream of a free and democratic Libya — interweaves the two storylines with spectacular effect, careening from wrenching reunions with relatives to a climactic negotiation with Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam. The dictator’s heir promises to help.

The hope he offers seems as reliable as the prospect of a stable, peaceful Libya. Since Matar’s visit, the country has been riven by parliamentary schism and militant Islamism, leading some to lament Gadhafi’s downfall. Matar likens these Libyans to “a man who looks at the ashes and says, ‘I much prefer the fire.’ ” Alas, that doesn’t make the ashes look any better.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-return-searching-for-a-father-in-libya/feed/0US, other powers want to arm Libyan governmenthttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/us-other-powers-want-to-arm-libyan-government/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/us-other-powers-want-to-arm-libyan-government/#respondTue, 17 May 2016 00:21:00 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=874427The weapons would be supplied to counter the Islamic State and other militant groups

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, right, arrive for a meeting in Vienna, Austria, Monday May 16, 2016. (Leonhard Foeger/Pool Photo via AP)

VIENNA – In a move fraught with risk, the United States and other world powers said Monday they would supply Libya’s internationally recognized government with weapons to counter the Islamic State and other militant groups gaining footholds in the chaos-wracked country’s lawless regions.

Aiming at once to shore up the fragile government, and prevent Islamic State fighters and rival militias from further gains, the U.S., the four other permanent U.N. Security Council members and more than 15 other nations said they would approve exemptions to a United Nations arms embargo to allow military sales and aid to Libya’s so-called “Government of National Accord.”

In a joint communique, the nations said that while the broader embargo will remain in place, they are “ready to respond to the Libyan government’s requests for training and equipping” government forces.

“We will fully support these efforts while continuing to reinforce the UN arms embargo,” the communique said.

With support from all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the plan is unlikely to face significant opposition from any quarter.

The communique was issued at the end of the talks that gathered U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and top officials from more than 20 other nations to discuss ways to strengthen Libya’s fledgling government. The aim is to give the internationally recognized administration more muscle in fighting Islamic State radicals and end its rivalry with a group to the east claiming legitimacy.

The step will boost the government’s efforts to consolidate power and regain control over Libyan state institutions like the central bank and national oil company. However, it also comes with risks, not least of which is that the arms may be captured or otherwise taken by the Islamic State or other groups.

Kerry called the plan “a delicate balance.”

“But we are all of us here today supportive of the fact that if you have a legitimate government and that legitimate government is fighting terrorism, that legitimate government should not be victimized by (the embargo),” he told reporters.

Libyan Premier Fayez al-Sarraj said his government would soon submit a weapons wish list to the Security Council for approval.

“We have a major challenge ahead of us,” in fighting extremists, he said. “We urge the international community to assist us.”

Before the meeting, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier outlined the high stakes at hand.

“The key question is whether Libya remains a place where terrorism, criminal human smuggling and instability continue to expand, or if we are able, together with the government of national unity to recover stability,” he told reporters.

The challenges are daunting.

Libya descended into chaos after the toppling and death of Moammar Gaddafi five years ago and soon turned into a battleground of rival militias battling for powers. More recently, the power vacuum has allowed Islamic State radicals to expand their presence, giving them a potential base in a country separated from Europe only by a relatively small stretch of the Mediterranean Sea.

Also worrying for Europe is the potential threat of a mass influx of refugees amassing in Libya, now that the earlier route from Turkey into Greece has been essentially shut down. British Foreign Secretary David Hammond said his government had received a request from the Libyan government to bolster its Coast Guard _ a project “which will address Libyan concerns about smuggling and insecurity on their border but will also address European concerns about illegal migration.”

In Libya, meanwhile, the U.N.-established presidency council on Monday effectively gave the go-ahead for 18 government ministers to start work, even though they have not received backing from the parliament.

The council was created under a U.N.-brokered unity deal struck in December to reconcile Libya’s many political divisions. It won the support of a former powerbase in the country’s capital, Tripoli, but failed to secure a vote of confidence by the country’s internationally recognized parliament, based in Tobruk, a city in eastern Libya.

The U.N. deal also created the internationally recognized government, through a de facto Cabinet to administer the country under Prime Minister-designate Fayez Serraj and the 18 ministers will answer to him.

Divisions in theTobruk parliament between boycotters and supporters of the new government have prevented the house from reaching a quorum to endorse the council.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/us-other-powers-want-to-arm-libyan-government/feed/0Serbia: 2 hostages believed killed in US airstrikes in Libyahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/serbia-2-hostages-believed-killed-in-us-airstrikes-in-libya/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/serbia-2-hostages-believed-killed-in-us-airstrikes-in-libya/#respondSat, 20 Feb 2016 11:39:23 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=836861BELGRADE, Serbia – Two Serbian embassy staffers held hostage since November are believed to have been killed in Friday’s U.S. airstrikes on an Islamic State camp in western Libya, Serbia’s…

]]>BELGRADE, Serbia – Two Serbian embassy staffers held hostage since November are believed to have been killed in Friday’s U.S. airstrikes on an Islamic State camp in western Libya, Serbia’s foreign minister said Saturday.

Minister Ivica Dacic identified the two as Sladjana Stankovic, a communications officer, and Jovica Stepic, a driver. They were snatched in November after their diplomatic convoy, including the ambassador, came under fire near the coastal Libyan city of Sabratha.

Speaking at a news conference in Belgrade, Dacic said information about the deaths was given to Serbia by foreign officials but had not yet been confirmed by the Libyan government.

“We got the information, including photos, which clearly show that this is most probably true,” Dacic said.

American F-15E fighter-bombers on Friday struck an Islamic State training camp in rural Libya near the Tunisian border, killing dozens, probably including an IS operative considered responsible for deadly attacks in Tunisia last year, U.S. and local officials said.

Dacic said Serbia had known where the hostages were and had been working to get them back, adding that Libyan troops were considering an operation to free them.

“I believe we had been close to the solution for them to be freed. Unfortunately, as a consequence of the attack against ISIS in Libya, the two of them lost their lives,” Dacic said. “We will seek official explanation from both Libya and the United States about the available facts and the selection of targets.”

He said, according to the information received by the Serbian security services, a criminal group that had demanded ransom and was believed to be linked to IS had been holding the hostages at the site that was bombed.

“On the other hand, the American administration said it was an (ISIS) training camp,” Dacic said. “This is information that has to be checked.”

A Libyan armed group calling itself the Special Deterrent Forces announced on Facebook that the two bodies had been delivered to Tripoli’s Matiga Airport. The group posted pictures showing two green coffins inside a hearse, and another of one of the coffins sitting on a tarmac next to a small plane.

The Special Deterrent Forces are loyal to the militia-backed government that now controls Tripoli. The group’s posting did not indicate when the bodies would be flown to Serbia.

In November, gunmen in Libya crashed into a convoy of vehicles taking Serbia’s ambassador to neighbouring Tunisia and then kidnapped the two embassy employees. Serbian ambassador Oliver Potezica, who escaped unharmed and was travelling in the three-vehicle convoy with his wife and two sons, later recounted the attack.

“The attack happened when one of the embassy cars was hit from behind. When the driver came out to check what happened, he was dragged into one of the attackers’ cars,” Potezica told Tanjug news agency.

Since the 2011 overthrow of Libya’s longtime autocrat Moammar Gadhafi, the sprawling North African nation has fractured into warring camps backed by a loose array of militias, former rebels and tribes.

Libya’s internationally recognized government has been forced out of the capital, Tripoli, and now operates out of the eastern cities of Tobruk and Bayda. Another government, backed by Islamist-affiliated militias known as Libya Dawn, controls Tripoli and much of western Libya. U.N.-brokered efforts to form a unity government continue to falter.

The chaos has provided fertile ground for Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State group to flourish.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/serbia-2-hostages-believed-killed-in-us-airstrikes-in-libya/feed/0Official: US warplanes hit multiple IS targets in Libyahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/official-us-warplanes-hit-multiple-is-targets-in-libya/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/official-us-warplanes-hit-multiple-is-targets-in-libya/#commentsFri, 19 Feb 2016 12:22:03 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=836403Washington and Europe are concerned the number of Islamic State fighters in Libya is increasing

]]>WASHINGTON – American warplanes struck multiple targets in Libya overnight, hitting an Islamic State training camp and a senior extremist leader, U.S. officials said Friday.

One official described the strikes as being carried out “against an ISIL training camp” and said the attack near Sabratha, Libya, not far from the Tunisian border, “likely killed ISIL operative Noureddine Chouchane.” ISIL is an acronym for the Islamic State group.

The U.S. officials spoke on grounds of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to be publicly identified as discussing a military operation not yet formally announced.

President Barack Obama earlier this year directed his national security team to bolster counterterrorism efforts in Libya while also pursuing diplomatic possibilities for solving its political crisis and forming a government of national unity. While the Islamic State has emerged in other places, including Afghanistan, Libya is seen as its key focus outside of Syria and Iraq.

The U.S. military has been closely monitoring Islamic State movements in Libya, and small teams of U.S. military personnel have moved in and out of the country over a period of months. British, French and Italian special forces also have been in Libya helping with aerial surveillance, mapping and intelligence gathering in several cities, including Benghazi in the east and Zintan in the west, according to two Libyan military officials who are co-ordinating with them. The Libyan officials spoke on condition of anonymity recently with The Associated Press on this matter because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

U.S. officials predicted early this month that it would be weeks or longer before U.S. special forces would be sent, citing the need for more consultations with European allies. Additional intelligence would help refine targets for any sort of military strikes, but surveillance drones are in high demand elsewhere, including in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Adding to the concern in Washington and Europe is evidence that the number of Islamic State fighters in Libya is increasing – now believed to be up from about 2,000 to 5,000 – even as the group’s numbers in Syria and Iraq are shrinking under more unrelenting U.S. and coalition airstrikes.

Obama discussed the situation when asked during a news conference Wednesday at the closing of a summit in California where he hosted leaders of several nation members of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) group.

“With respect to Libya,” he said, “I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al Qaida wherever they appeared.” ISIS is another acronym for Islamic State.

“We will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind,” the president said. “And we are working with our other coalition partners to make sure that as we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them. At the same time, we’re working diligently with the United Nations to try to get a government in place in Libya. And that’s been a problem.” “The tragedy of Libya over the last several years is Libya has a relatively small population and a lot of oil wealth and could be really successful,” he said. “They are divided by tribal lines and ethnic lines, power plays.”

“There is now, I think, a recognition on the part of a broad middle among their political leadership that it makes sense to unify so that there is just some semblance of a state there, but extremes on either side are still making it difficult for that state to cohere,” Obama told reporters.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/official-us-warplanes-hit-multiple-is-targets-in-libya/feed/1Doctor describes daring migrant rescue on Mediterranean Seahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/doctor-describes-daring-migrant-rescue-on-mediterranean-sea/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/doctor-describes-daring-migrant-rescue-on-mediterranean-sea/#respondWed, 06 May 2015 09:22:39 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=715915"When they could see the lights ... they just started clapping.''

]]>OTTAWA – They first laid eyes on Europe when the distant lights of Malta came into view, around sunset on Monday, brightening their mood and setting off a weary smattering of applause.

They were 369 men, women – eight of them pregnant – and children who had fled the forgotten carnage of war-torn Eritrea on the Horn of Africa. They’d made it all the way to the Libyan coast, where many had been jailed and robbed before human smugglers set them adrift into the calm waters of the Mediterranean Sea along with thousands of others on the weekend.

They were the lucky ones compared with the 800 migrants who drowned last month when their boat capsized off Libya – hundreds of them locked down by smugglers – or the 400 who drowned a few days earlier.

On Sunday afternoon, the Eritrean group’s overloaded fishing boat was intercepted by a specially outfitted search-and-rescue vessel operated by the aid agency, Doctors Without Borders, which had set sail the previous day.

Crew members transferred the migrants over to the rescue vessel. And there they met Dr. Simon Bryant, of Canmore, Alta., one of the physicians on the boat.

He helped treat their dehydration, sea sickness, skin infections and the various injuries inflicted by severe beatings. Bryant and his 20 fellow crew members, medics and rescue professionals watched with misty eyes as the migrants’ much coveted continent came into view.

“When they could see the lights, and they realized these were not the lights of fishing vessels, but these were lights of solid land in Europe – passing Malta on our way to Sicily – they just started clapping.”

The Phoenix rescue vessel launched Saturday from Malta on a six-month mission to bring aid directly to the record number of fleeing migrants taking to the Mediterranean in what has sparked a major crisis for the European Union. It is jointly operated by the group Migrant Offshore Aid Station, or MOAS.

The Phoenix is a 40-metre ship with a fully equipped medical clinic, and a large drone “cam-copter” bearing an infrared camera that transmits images back to the doctors’ boat. The Phoenix project estimates it will come to the aid of thousands of fleeing migrants and it is already off to an auspicious start.

The Phoenix also helped rescue another 104 migrants on Monday from a long inflatable raft, helping transfer them to a passing oil tanker, because the Phoenix was already full to capacity with Eritrean passengers.

Bryant, 56, is an emergency room physician who has made several sea voyages in the Arctic and Antarctic.

He said he joined this mission because not enough is being done to help the thousands of desperate migrants currently making the dangerous voyage to Europe from North Africa.

“For me the bottom line is: migration is a reality based on untenable living conditions because of war, because of famine or inhuman economic situations,” he said.

“By the time they get to that point, all they want to do is live in a decent way, or die.”

Bryant said Europe needs to provide more search-and-rescue assets, and it needs to find a safe way to grant asylum seekers refugee status so they’re not compelled to make a life-and-death sea crossing in order to gain it.

“Europe is using the Mediterranean Sea as a border fence, and they’re failing to meet their obligations,” Bryant said bluntly, over a crackling Skype connection as the Phoenix made its way back to the Libyan coast after dropping off its Eritrean passengers in Sicily.

The Eritreans slept on the deck of the Phoenix overnight Sunday, bundled in warm blankets, after being fed, medically examined and, when necessary, treated. The vessel was met by Italian doctors in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo, who immediately took over care of the most serious cases, while the remaining passengers were led off and processed.

Bryant said he was moved by the reaction of the Phoenix’s youngest passenger – a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler whose gender he won’t reveal because he feels bound by his oath of patient confidentiality – when the ship reached Sicily.

“What I remember about that person is a picture that one of my colleagues took – this little person giving a high-five when they left the ship,” he said. “That’s really quite moving to see.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/doctor-describes-daring-migrant-rescue-on-mediterranean-sea/feed/0Libyan students in Canada cut off from scholarship fundinghttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libyan-students-in-canada-cut-off-from-scholarship-funding/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libyan-students-in-canada-cut-off-from-scholarship-funding/#respondWed, 22 Apr 2015 09:38:56 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=710435More than 1,100 Libyans at schools across Canada benefit from a scholarship program from the government, but their funds have not yet arrived

]]>HALIFAX – When Albahlool Omar Idhbeaa came from Libya to Nova Scotia to complete his doctorate, he came with the understanding that his home country would cover his tuition and the cost of supporting his family.

But he says when he went to register for his upcoming summer semester, he ran into a problem.

“I went to the lady who is working at the student accounts and she told me I owe them money and they’re holding my account,” said Idhbeaa, a second-year doctoral student in engineering at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Now he says he can’t sign up for summer classes or see his grades from last semester.

Idhbeaa is one of many Libyan students who have come to Canada through the Libyan-North American Scholarship Program, intended to cover tuition, living expenses and health insurance for graduate students.

More than 1,100 Libyans at schools across Canada benefit from the program, according to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, the organization responsible for administering funding from the Libyan government.

Earlier this month, the bureau issued a statement saying it was placing a hold on financial support letters for Libyan students because their government had not transferred funds for the 2014-15 academic year.

Idhbeaa says it isn’t only tuition that is held up. He also does not know when he will receive his next living allowance, which he uses to support his wife and two daughters, and their health insurance expires at the end of April.

But his biggest concern is not being able to complete his degree.

“We are worrying about the next semester, what’s going to happen,” he said.

“Study for Libyan students is very important. We came here for this purpose.”

Abourawi Alwaar also came from Libya to do graduate studies in engineering.

He was accepted into a master’s program in September but doubts he’ll be able to attend because his funding ended before he could finish required courses in English as a second language. Alwaar says his family has been unable to transfer money to him from Libya as a result of problems with the banking system.

His roommate Abdurrahman Elajmi, also a student from Libya, says he feels stranded in Canada.

He thought the educational bureau would cover everything for him, “because I am in a new country, different culture, different system,” he said.

Jennifer Humphries, the bureau’s vice-president for membership, public policy and communications, says the organization is doing its best to get the money out of Libya but unrest there is making that difficult.

Civil war broke out in Libya in 2011 and violence in the country escalated again in 2014, prompting the Canadian government to close its embassy in Tripoli until stability is restored.

“There are so many factors militating against their ease of transferring that money to us,” Humphries said.

“The government institutions are really not functioning well. In fact there are two governments competing for position.”

In March, the bureau met with Libya’s central bank governor in Turkey, Humphries said, and that helped some money to be released for overdue living allowances. But she said that hasn’t helped with tuition payments, which are in arrears for many students.

“Hopefully the central bank in Tripoli will be able to release more funds to us promptly because it’s difficult. It’s their students. The students have come to North America on the promise of a scholarship from their home government,” she said.

For now, Humphries says her organization is encouraging Canadian institutions to do what they can to support the Libyan students and allow them to continue the studies they came for.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libyan-students-in-canada-cut-off-from-scholarship-funding/feed/0Survivor says hundreds of migrants locked inside sinking boathttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/survivor-says-hundreds-of-migrants-locked-inside-sinking-boat/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/survivor-says-hundreds-of-migrants-locked-inside-sinking-boat/#respondMon, 20 Apr 2015 08:22:00 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=709117Eighteen ships joined the rescue effort, but only 28 survivors and 24 bodies had been pulled from the water by nightfall on Sunday

ROME – A smuggler’s boat crammed with hundreds of people overturned off Libya’s coast as rescuers approached, causing what could be the Mediterranean’s deadliest knownmigrant tragedy and intensifying pressure on the European Union Sunday to finally meet demands for decisive action.

Survivor accounts of the number aboard varied, with the Italian Coast Guard saying that the capsized boat had a capacity for “hundreds” of people. Italian prosecutors said a Bangladeshi survivor flown to Sicily for treatment told them 950 people were aboard, including hundreds who had been locked in the hold by smugglers. Earlier, authorities said a survivor told them 700 migrants were on board.

It was not immediately clear if they were referring to the same survivor, and Premier Matteo Renzi said Italian authorities were “not in a position to confirm or verify” how many were on board when the boat set out from Libya.

Eighteen ships joined the rescue effort, but only 28 survivors and 24 bodies had been pulled from the water by nightfall, Renzi said.

These small numbers make more sense if hundreds of people were locked in the hold, because with so much weight down below, “surely the boat would have sunk,” said Gen. Antonino Iraso, of the Italian Border Police, which has deployed boats in the operation.

Prosecutor Giovanni Salvi told The Associated Press by phone from the city of Catania that a survivor from Bangladesh described the situation on the fishing boat to prosecutors who interviewed him in a hospital. The man said about 300 people were in the hold, locked in there by the smugglers, when the vessel set out. He said that of the 950 who set out aboard the doomed boat, some 200 were women and several dozen were children.

Salvi stressed that there was no confirmation yet of the man’s account and that the investigation was ongoing.

Iraso said the sea in the area is too deep for divers, suggesting that the final toll may never be known. The sea off Libya runs as deep as 5 kilometres or more.

“How can it be that we daily are witnessing a tragedy?” asked Renzi, who strategized with his top ministers ahead of Monday’s European Union meeting in Luxembourg, where foreign ministers scrambled to add stopping the smugglers to their agenda.

Resurgent right-wing political parties have made a rallying cry out of a rising tide of illegal migration. So far this year, 35,000 asylum seekers and migrants have reached Europe and more than 900 are known to have died trying.

With Sunday’s tragedy, demands for decisive action were going mainstream, as authorities from France, Spain, Germany and Britain joined calls for a unified response.

“Europe can do more and Europe must do more,” said Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament. “It is a shame and a confession of failure how many countries run away from responsibility and how little money we provide for rescue missions.”

Europe must mobilize “more ships, more overflights by aircraft,” French President Francois Hollande told French TV Canal + on Sunday. “Words won’t do anymore,” Spain’s Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, told a political rally.

Renzi said he too wants action, but he rejected calls by some Italian lawmakers for a naval blockade. That would only “wind up helping the smugglers” since military ships would be there to rescue any migrants, and they wouldn’t be able to return passengers to chaos and violence in Libya.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the latest tragedy is an urgent reminder “of the critical need for a robust search and rescue capacity in the Mediterranean,” in a statement released late Sunday by his spokesman. Ban said the Mediterranean has become “the world’s deadliest route used by asylum seekers and migrants.”

Meanwhile Sunday, rescuers were “checking who is alive and who is dead” in an area littered with debris and oil from the capsized ship. Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, whose island nation joined the effort, said only 50 survived, and called it the “biggest human tragedy of the last few years.”

The 20-meter (66-foot) vessel may have overturned because migrants rushed to one side of the craft late Saturday night when they saw an approaching Portuguese-flagged container ship, the King Jacob, which was sent to the area by Italy’s Coast Guard. The ship’s crew “immediately deployed rescue boats, gangway, nets and life rings,” a spokesman for its owner said.

Asked whether migrants rushed to one side as the Portuguese vessel pulled close, Iraso told Sky TG24 TV that “the dynamics aren’t clear. But this is not the first time that has happened.”

Renzi praised the container ship for quickly responding on what would become its fifth recent rescue operation.

“Since the waters of the Mediterranean Sea are not too cold at the moment, authorities hope to find more survivors,” said International Organization for Migration spokesman Joel Millman.

United Nations refugee agency spokeswoman Carlotta Sami tweeted that according to one survivor, the boat had set out with 700 migrants aboard. When it overturned, “the people ended up in the water, with the boat on top of them,” Sami told Italian state TV.

“There are fears there could be hundreds of dead,” Pope Francis said in St. Peter’s Square, lending his moral authority to the political calls for action by urging “the international community to act decisively and promptly, to prevent similar tragedies from occurring again.”

Desperate migrants fleeing war, persecution and conflict in Africa, the Middle East and Asia have long tried to reach Europe. Libya has increasingly become a more frequent point of departure in the years since rival militias, tribal factions and other political forces destabilized the country following the bloody end of Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship.

Malta and Italy are closest to the Libyan coast, and have received the brunt of a migrant tide that carried 219,000 people from Africa to Europe last year. Some 3,500 are known to have died along the way, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement Sunday.

In Italy’s Parliament, the leaders of foreign affairs and defence commissions pushed for the EU and the UN to prepare a naval blockade of Libya’s coast. Without one, “the traffickers will continue to operate and make money and the wretched will continue to die,” said Pier Fernando Casini, the Senate foreign affairs commission president.

Meanwhile, about 100 migrants rescued by a different merchant vessel in a separate operation were being brought to the Sicilian port of Pozzallo late Sunday night, authorities said.

Migrants wait to disembark in the Sicilian harbor of Pozzallo. About 100 migrants were rescued on Sunday by a merchant vessel in the Sicilian Strait. Another smuggler’s boat crammed with hundreds of people overturned off Libya’s coast on Saturday. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

ROME — A smuggler’s boat crammed with hundreds of people overturned off Libya’s coast as rescuers approached, causing what could be the Mediterranean’s deadliest known migrant tragedy and intensifying pressure on the European Union Sunday to finally meet demands for decisive action.

Survivor accounts of the number aboard varied, with the Italian Coast Guard saying that the capsized boat had a capacity for “hundreds” of people. Italian prosecutors said a Bangladeshi survivor flown to Sicily for treatment told them 950 people were aboard, including hundreds who had been locked in the hold by smugglers. Earlier, authorities said a survivor told them 700 migrants were on board.

It was not immediately clear if they were referring to the same survivor, and Premier Matteo Renzi said Italian authorities were “not in a position to confirm or verify” how many were on board when the boat set out from Libya.

Eighteen ships joined the rescue effort, but only 28 survivors and 24 bodies had been pulled from the water by nightfall, Renzi said.

These small numbers make more sense if hundreds of people were locked in the hold, because with so much weight down below, “surely the boat would have sunk,” said Gen. Antonino Iraso, of the Italian Border Police, which has deployed boats in the operation.

Prosecutor Giovanni Salvi told The Associated Press by phone from the city of Catania that a survivor from Bangladesh described the situation on the fishing boat to prosecutors who interviewed him in a hospital. The man said about 300 people were in the hold, locked in their by the smugglers, when the vessel set out. He said that of the 950 who set out aboard the doomed boat, some 200 were women and several dozen were children.

Salvi stressed that there was no confirmation yet of the man’s account and that the investigation was ongoing.

Iraso said the sea in the area is too deep for divers, suggesting that the final toll may never be known. The sea off Libya runs as deep as 3 miles (5 kilometres) or more.

“How can it be that we daily are witnessing a tragedy?” asked Renzi, who strategized with his top ministers ahead of Monday’s European Union meeting in Luxembourg, where foreign ministers scrambled to add stopping the smugglers to their agenda.

Resurgent right-wing political parties have made a rallying cry out of a rising tide of illegal migration. So far this year, 35,000 asylum seekers and migrants have reached Europe and more than 900 are known to have died trying.

With Sunday’s tragedy, demands for decisive action were going mainstream, as authorities from France, Spain, Germany and Britain joined calls for a unified response.

“Europe can do more and Europe must do more,” said Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament. “It is a shame and a confession of failure how many countries run away from responsibility and how little money we provide for rescue missions.”

Europe must mobilize “more ships, more overflights by aircraft,” French President Francois Hollande told French TV Canal + on Sunday. “Words won’t do anymore,” Spain’s Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, told a political rally.

Renzi said he too wants action, but he rejected calls by some Italian lawmakers for a naval blockade. That would only “wind up helping the smugglers” since military ships would be there to rescue any migrants, and they wouldn’t be able to return passengers to chaos and violence in Libya.

Meanwhile Sunday, rescuers were “checking who is alive and who is dead” in an area littered with debris and oil from the capsized ship. Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, whose island nation joined the effort, said only 50 survived, and called it the “biggest human tragedy of the last few years.”

The 20-meter (66-foot) vessel may have overturned because migrants rushed to one side of the craft late Saturday night when they saw an approaching Portuguese-flagged container ship, the King Jacob, which was sent to the area by Italy’s Coast Guard. The ship’s crew “immediately deployed rescue boats, gangway, nets and life rings,” a spokesman for its owner said.

Asked whether migrants rushed to one side as the Portuguese vessel pulled close, Iraso told Sky TG24 TV that “the dynamics aren’t clear. But this is not the first time that has happened.”

Renzi praised the container ship for quickly responding on what would become its fifth recent rescue operation.

“Since the waters of the Mediterranean Sea are not too cold at the moment, authorities hope to find more survivors,” said International Organization for Migration spokesman Joel Millman.

United Nations refugee agency spokeswoman Carlotta Sami tweeted that according to one survivor, the boat had set out with 700 migrants aboard. When it overturned, “the people ended up in the water, with the boat on top of them,” Sami told Italian state TV.

“There are fears there could be hundreds of dead,” Pope Francis said in St. Peter’s Square, lending his moral authority to the political calls for action by urging “the international community to act decisively and promptly, to prevent similar tragedies from occurring again.”

Desperate migrants fleeing war, persecution and conflict in Africa, the Middle East and Asia have long tried to reach Europe. Libya has increasingly become a more frequent point of departure in the years since rival militias, tribal factions and other political forces destabilized the country following the bloody end of Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship.

Malta and Italy are closest to the Libyan coast, and have received the brunt of a migrant tide that carried 219,000 people from Africa to Europe last year. Some 3,500 are known to have died along the way, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement Sunday.

In Italy’s Parliament, the leaders of foreign affairs and defence commissions pushed for the EU and the UN to prepare a naval blockade of Libya’s coast. Without one, “the traffickers will continue to operate and make money and the wretched will continue to die,” said Pier Fernando Casini, the Senate foreign affairs commission president.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/rescuers-find-few-survivors-off-libya-where-migrant-ship-capsized/feed/1An Islamic State paradisehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/an-islamic-state-paradise/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/an-islamic-state-paradise/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 23:03:04 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=684519How the West helped turn Libya into a new terrorist hot spot on the shores of the Mediterranean

Islamic State’s most horrific video to date, the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians, was shocking not only for its unsettling content but for its novel setting. It was not shot in the deserts of Iraq or Syria but on a beach in Libya, far from where the U.S. and its allies have been bombing the group. The video, released in mid-February, seemed to ceremoniously announce Islamic State’s opening of a whole new front in its war to create an Islamic caliphate.

The extremist group has been making inroads in the oil-rich North African country over the past few months, killing at least eight in an attack on a five-star hotel in Tripoli and cruising the streets in a motorcade of flag-bearing jihadist “police” cruisers. Retaliatory air strikes by Egypt against Islamic State targets in eastern Libya don’t appear to have slowed the group, which last week seized a university and other government buildings in the city of Sirte.

Four years after a NATO-led force released Libya from the grip of its long-time authoritarian ruler, Moammar Gadhaﬁ, the country has become a terrorist hub. Just as it did in Syria and Iraq, Islamic State has capitalized on instability in Libya—the result of a power vacuum created by opposing militia-backed governments, each convinced of its own legitimacy. “There is no Libya now,” says Fen Hampson, an international affairs professor at Carleton University. “It’s broken into many, many pieces.”

The fracture dates back to at least 2011. Haunted by the failure to intervene in Rwanda and elsewhere, Hampson explains, the international community ousted Gadhafi during the Arab Spring in hopes of preventing mass civilian casualties. But, plagued by the ongoing consequences of a failure to nation-build in Iraq and Afghanistan, the intervenors (which included Canada) were not set on staying. “Post-Gadhafi, nobody really wanted to own it,” Hampson says. “As the situation deteriorated, more and more countries headed for the exit.”

A terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi helped motivate the U.S. to leave, and crises in Syria, Egypt and Ukraine increasingly attracted the attention and resources of the small collection of countries with the capacity to effectively tackle Libya’s disarray. Plans to train a police force, set up a national defence system and install a functional political system were all but abandoned. Libya, in effect, was left on its own.

In the absence of any official power, two rival governments have emerged: One allied with the Libyan National Army that occupies much of eastern Libya; the other allied with a coalition of militias and Islamist groups in the west. Funds from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Qatar—each with its own interests—have only intensified the conflict.

Meanwhile, Libyan jihadists, many of whom trained and fought in Syria and Iraq, have returned to their home country and invited disparate Islamist factions to pledge allegiance to Islamic State. “It was inevitable for a group like [Islamic State] to grow there,” says Hassan Hassan, an Abu Dhabi-based analyst and author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. “All of these factors—chaos, the lack of a political process, the negligence of the international community—provided the perfect environment for [Islamic State] to grow as it did in Syria and Iraq.”

Hassan says Islamic State’s entry into Africa will allow the group to thrive, attracting a growing number of jihadists in the area, where al-Qaeda sympathizers have been regrouping. He also points to Libya’s abundance of oil, a potential revenue source for the group, and its proximity to Europe. Tripoli is less than 500 km from Italy’s shores, and a record 170,000 migrants made the perilous, sometimes fatal trip from Libya to Italy by boat last year alone. There are now fears that jihadists might try to blend in with migrants crossing the Mediterranean. While those fears appear to be unfounded, they could further fuel the backlash against illegal immigration in the European Union.

Italy and the Arab League are calling for an international response to combat Islamic State in Libya. The U.S. and Britain have so far refused to lift an arms embargo to better equip Libya’s army, saying the country first needs a unified government. The mayhem left unattended by that chicken-and-egg conundrum will reverberate through north Africa, according to Hassan. “As jihadists grow in Tunisia”—there are 4,000 there, by his estimation—“the [Islamic State] group inside Libya will have even more strategic depth,” he says. Despite the relative stability of states such as Tunisia and Morocco, which makes them less vulnerable to an Islamic State presence like that seen in Libya, he adds, “the future is promising for [Islamic State] in north Africa.” And a pressing problem for everyone else.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/an-islamic-state-paradise/feed/1U.S., Britain reject Libya’s call to lift arms embargohttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/u-s-britain-reject-libyas-call-to-lift-arms-embargo/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/u-s-britain-reject-libyas-call-to-lift-arms-embargo/#respondFri, 20 Feb 2015 10:55:36 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=682345"If we fail to have arms provided to us, this can only play into the hands of extremists,'' Libya's foreign minister said

]]>Two of the most powerful members of the U.N. Security Council are rejecting Libya’s call to lift a U.N. arms embargo so it can defend itself against the Islamic State group, saying Thursday that the chaotic country needs a national unity government first.

Libya’s foreign minister told an emergency council meeting Wednesday that lifting the embargo is necessary as the militant group establishes a presence in northern Africa and moves closer to Europe. Alarm soared after a video released over the weekend showed the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians there.

“If we fail to have arms provided to us, this can only play into the hands of extremists,” Mohammed al Dairi said.

But the United States and Britain are openly worried about allowing more weapons into a country that has two separate governments, multiple militant groups and a high risk of weapons falling into unwanted hands.

Both countries, as permanent members of the 15-seat council, can use their veto to block any proposed action.

“The problem is that there isn’t a government in Libya that is effective and in control of its territory,” British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said during a visit to Spain. “There isn’t a Libyan military which the international community can effectively support.”

Libya first needs a government of national unity in place, along with a U.N. presence in the country, he said.

“But simply pouring weapons into one faction or the other, which is essentially what has been proposed, is not to bring us to a resolution to the crisis in Libya, and is not going to make Europe safer, is going to make it more at risk,” Hammond said.

Libya is split between the internationally recognized government based in Tobruk in the east and another government in Tripoli, backed by Islamist militias. The U.N. embargo has been in place since 2011, the year that long-ruling dictator Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. position on keeping the arms embargo hasn’t changed. “It permits transfers necessary to support the Libyan government while allowing the Security Council to seek guard against the high risk that weapons may be diverted to non- state actors.”

A spokesman for Libya’s mission to the U.N. said he could not comment Thursday night.

Libya can apply for weapons imports under an exemption in the arms embargo for the Libyan government, but the Security Council committee that considers such requests has been cautious about giving approval amid concern that weapons might be leaked to armed groups.

The Security Council on Thursday night was preparing a press statement saying council members fully support U.N. envoy to Libya Bernardino Leon’s efforts aimed at a compromise between Libya’s two governments.

In a meeting in Washington on countering extremism, Secretary of State John Kerry, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry “expressed deep concern over the situation in Libya and stressed the importance of political dialogue as the only way out of the current crisis,” a U.N. statement said.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/u-s-britain-reject-libyas-call-to-lift-arms-embargo/feed/0Libya asks UN to lift arms embargo so it can fight Islamic Statehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libya-asks-un-to-lift-arms-embargo-so-it-can-fight-islamic-state/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libya-asks-un-to-lift-arms-embargo-so-it-can-fight-islamic-state/#respondThu, 19 Feb 2015 10:45:50 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=681843The country requested "urgent support" in an emergency meeting of the Security Council

]]>Libya’s foreign minister on Wednesday demanded that the U.N. Security Council lift an arms embargo so his country can fight the Islamic State group as it establishes a presence in north Africa and moves closer to Europe.

Foreign Minister Mohammed al Dairi spoke to an emergency session of the council amid regional alarm after the Islamic State group over the weekend posted a video of the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya.

Al Dairi stressed that Libya is not asking for international intervention. But he said the international community has a “legal and moral responsibility to lend urgent support” and that the region, including the Mediterranean, is in danger.

“If we fail to have arms provided to us, this can only play into the hands of extremists,” he said. He told reporters he wanted to see the same attention paid the danger in Libya as has been paid to Iraq and Syria, where a U.S.-led coalition is battling the Islamic State group.

The foreign minister of neighbouring Egypt, Sameh Shoukry, called for a naval blockade on arms heading to areas of Libya outside the control of “legitimate authorities.” He did not rule out troops on the ground in Libya and said his country was seeking international support “by all means.”

Jordan was circulating a draft resolution on the issue to fellow council members later Wednesday. Aside from the call to lift the arms embargo, the draft resolution also calls on militias to withdraw from Tripoli to allow the return of the “legitimate government,” and it condemns any attempt to supply arms to non-state actors.

Egypt responded strongly to the beheadings, carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State group positions in Libya and saying it was in self-defence. Shoukry has said those airstrikes could continue.

Energy rich Libya is wracked by the worst fighting since long-ruling dictator Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown in 2011. Two rival governments and parliaments – each backed by different militias – rule in the country’s eastern and western regions. After Islamic and tribal militias took over the capital, Tripoli, the elected parliament has been forced to function in the eastern city of Tobruk.

On Tuesday, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi had called on the United Nations to approve a new coalition for airstrikes in Libya, where the extremists have set up their first major affiliate outside of Iraq and Syria.

But U.N. diplomats said Egypt’s initial demands eased during talks later Tuesday.

It’s possible for Libya to apply for weapons imports under an exemption in the arms embargo for the Libyan government, but the U.N. committee that considers such requests has been cautious about giving approval amid concern that weapons might be leaked to armed groups. The U.N. embargo has been in place since 2011.

Countries in the region have been stepping up to offer support since the video of the beheadings emerged. Both Italy and Algeria during the council meeting expressed their willingness to participate in international efforts.

Italy is especially worried. The country’s islands on the Mediterranean are only a few hundred miles from Libya, and Italian officials worry that militants will mingle with the waves of migrants being smuggled across from Libya and arrive in Italy by sea.

France, a lead player in the campaign to oust Gadhafi in 2011, has campaigned for months for some kind of international action in Libya.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libya-asks-un-to-lift-arms-embargo-so-it-can-fight-islamic-state/feed/0Egypt warplanes strike IS targets after video of mass killinghttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/egypt-warplanes-strike-is-targets-after-video-of-mass-killing/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/egypt-warplanes-strike-is-targets-after-video-of-mass-killing/#respondMon, 16 Feb 2015 11:06:08 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=680429A video purporting to show the mass beheading of Coptic Christian hostages was released late Sunday

]]>CAIRO – Egypt said Monday it has launched airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Libya after the extremist group released a grisly video showing the beheading of several Egyptian Coptic Christians it had held hostage for weeks.

A spokesman for the Armed Forces General Command announced the strikes on state radio Monday, marking the first time Cairo has publicly acknowledged taking military action in neighbouring Libya, where extremist groups seen as a threat to both countries have taken root in recent years.

The statement said the warplanes targeted weapons caches and training camps before returning safely. It said the strikes were “to avenge the bloodshed and to seek retribution from the killers.”

“Let those far and near know that Egyptians have a shield that protects them,” it said.

Libya’s air force meanwhile announced it had launched strikes in the eastern city of Darna, which was taken over by an Islamic State affiliate last year. The announcement, on the Facebook page of the Air Force Chief of Staff, did not provide further details.

The video purporting to show the mass beheading of Coptic Christian hostages was released late Sunday by militants in Libya affiliated with the Islamic State group.

The killings raise the possibility that the extremist group – which controls about a third of Syria and Iraq in a self-declared caliphate – has established a direct affiliate less than 800 kilometres from the southern tip of Italy. One of the militants in the video makes direct reference to that possibility, saying the group now plans to “conquer Rome.”

The militants had been holding 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian labourers rounded up from the city of Sirte in December and January. It was not clear from the video whether all 21 hostages were killed.

It was one of the first such beheading videos from an Islamic State group affiliate to come from outside the group’s core territory in Syria and Iraq.

Libya in recent months has seen the worst unrest since the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, which will complicate any efforts to combat the country’s many Islamic extremist groups.

The internationally recognized government has been confined to the country’s far east since Islamist-allied militias seized the capital Tripoli last year, and Islamist politicians have reconstituted a previous government and parliament.

Egypt has strongly backed the internationally recognized government, and U.S. officials have said both Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have taken part in a series of mysterious airstrikes targeting Islamist-allied forces.

The Egyptian government declared a seven-day mourning period after the release of the video and President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi addressed the nation late Sunday night, pledging resilience in a fight against terrorism.

“These cowardly actions will not undermine our determination” said el-Sissi, who also banned all travel to Libya by Egyptian citizens. “Egypt and the whole world are in a fierce battle with extremist groups carrying extremist ideology and sharing the same goals.”

The U.N. Security Council meanwhile “strongly condemned the heinous and cowardly apparent murder in Libya of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by an affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/egypt-warplanes-strike-is-targets-after-video-of-mass-killing/feed/0Libya’s past parliament dissolves government in power grabhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libyas-past-parliament-dissolves-government-in-power-grab/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libyas-past-parliament-dissolves-government-in-power-grab/#respondMon, 25 Aug 2014 23:27:43 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=598221In the wake of the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, Libya has descended into chaos, with two parliaments and two governments

]]>CAIRO, Egypt — Libya’s past, Islamist-dominated parliament reconvened Monday and voted to disband the country’s current interim government, defying voters who elected its opponents to take over amid ceaseless fighting by rival militias.

The power grab highlights the lawlessness that has swept Libya since rebels overthrew dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 and later formed powerful militias that successive governments have been unable to tame. It also leaves troubled Libya with two governments and two parliaments, deepening divisions and escalating the political struggle that’s torn the country apart.

Islamist militias have attempted to cement their power in the capital after claiming its airport and forcing rival militias to withdraw. The fighting began after Islamist candidates lost parliament in June elections and a renegade general began a military campaign against Islamist-allied militias in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.

The Islamist-led past parliament voted unanimously to appoint a new “national salvation government,” headed by Omar al-Hassi, a university professor. That happened as Islamist-militias said in a statement that their forces had “liberated” all facilities and barracks in Tripoli, inviting the United Nations and foreign diplomats to return.

Libya’s newly elected parliament meanwhile continues to meet in the far eastern city of Tobruk far from the militia violence. Those lawmakers have branded Islamist militias as terrorists, sacked the country’s chief of staff over his alleged links to Islamists and named a new one who vowed Monday to wage war against “terrorists.”

Libya’s interim government is also unable to return to the capital and has been holding its meetings in the eastern city of Bayda. It sent its foreign minister to Egypt to meet officials from neighbouring countries to discuss ways to stop the spiraling violence.

The meeting ended with calls for disarming the militias and opposition to outside military intervention in Libya’s affairs. That appears to be an attempt to mute accusations that Libya’s neighbours, including Egypt, played a role in recent unclaimed airstrikes that have targeted Islamist militias’ positions in Tripoli.

Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri warned the gathering that the situation in Libya threatens the entire region and other parts of the world.

“The developments in Libya have left an impact we have felt on the security of neighbouring countries, with the presence and movement of extremist and terrorist groups whose activists are not only limited to the Libyan territories but also spill over to neighbouring countries,” he said.

Meanwhile, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States issued a joint statement to “strongly condemn the escalation of fighting and violence” and urged “all parties in Libya (to) accept an immediate ceasefire and engage constructively in the democratic process, abstaining from confrontational initiatives that risk undermining it.”

Also on Monday, retaliatory attacks swept Tripoli, targeting houses and buildings of Islamist rivals, including Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni. He accused Islamists of attacking his house in Tripoli, then torching and looting it.

“It is impossible that you can impose anything on Libyans using force,” al-Thinni warned. “It will be like a devil who wants to enter heaven.”

Libya’s divisions are rooted in rivalries between Islamists and non-Islamists, as well as powerful tribal and regional allegiances between groups who quickly filled the power vacuum after Gadhafi’s fall. Successive transitional governments have failed to control them.

The formation of a new government by the Islamist-dominated outgoing parliament came on the grounds that handover of authority earlier this month was improperly handled. However, Libya’s court system and laws remain in disarray, meaning whomever has the guns has the power.

The political rivalry has been coupled with militia infighting that has scarred the capital and driven out thousands of its residents. It has also turned Benghazi into a battlefield between Islamist militias and fighters loyal to a renegade army general who vowed to weed them out.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/canada-temporarily-withdraws-staff-from-libya/feed/0Suspect linked to Benghazi kept low profilehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/suspect-linked-to-benghazi-kept-low-profile/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/suspect-linked-to-benghazi-kept-low-profile/#respondTue, 17 Jun 2014 20:07:24 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=569769Attack two years ago killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans

]]>CAIRO, Egypt — The Libyan militant suspected in the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 attack on Americans in Benghazi was not a difficult man to find.

Ahmed Abu Khattala lived openly and freely in the restive eastern Libyan city — seen at cafes and in public places — even after the U.S. administration named him and another militant as suspects in the attack two years ago that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

“I am in my city, having a normal life and have no troubles,” he told The Associated Press late last year after he was first accused. He denied the allegations and said he didn’t fear being abducted from Libya.

That changed Sunday when he was detained by U.S. forces, marking the first U.S. apprehension of an alleged perpetrator in the assault that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Abu Khattala is being held in an undisclosed location outside of Libya and will be tried in U.S. court, according to the Pentagon press secretary, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby.

A man who identified himself as Abu Khattala’s brother, Abu Bakr, called the AP office in Cairo to ask if reports his brother had been detained were true.

He confirmed that his brother has been absent and his phone switched off since Sunday. He hung up after hearing the information about the capture and did not provide more details or comment.

Abu Khattala, was the commander of a militant group called the Abu Obaida bin Jarrah Brigade. Washington has accused him of being a member of the Ansar al-Shariah group, which is believed to be behind the attack and was listed by the U.S. as a terrorist group in January.

He claimed his group was only operational during the 2011 war against ousted dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and has since disbanded.

A witness interviewed by AP following the attack said Abu Khattala was at present at the building when it came under attack nearly two years ago, directing fighters. He admitted being there, but said he was helping in the rescue of men trapped in the area.

“It was the first time I learned that there was a U.S. consulate in this place,” Abu Khattala said a month after the attack. “And I never learned about, met, or had any relation with the U.S. ambassador.”

He said authorities never questioned him.

His confidence partly stemmed from the power that Islamic militants have accumulated in Libya since Gadhafi was ousted and killed. Militia groups, some of them inspired by al-Qaida, have operated with virtual impunity in the country, with the central government too weak to take action against them.

Abu Khattala, believed to be in his early 40s, had been imprisoned four to five times between 1996 and 2010 in Abu Salim prisons during Gadhafi’s rule, a notorious prison in the capital where most of his Islamist opponents were held. He was released in 2010 under a government amnesty.

But his name had surfaced as a suspect in the assassination of Abdel-Fattah Younis, the former top security chief under Gadhafi who defected to rebels and was gunned down along with his bodyguards in July 2011. Rebels then disbanded Abu Khattala’s group, and some members are believed to have joined Ansar al-Shariah.

He said he has since been working as a construction contractor.

Abu Khattala, believed to be originally from the western city of Misrata, seemed to be a mysterious character with few friends in Benghazi. A resident in the city who agreed to talk about him on condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety said people feared to even get close to the al-Lithi neighbourhood where Abu Khattala lived.

Mohammed Abu Sedra, an Islamist lawmaker in Libya, said he knew Abu Khattala during his imprisonment in Abu Salim.

“I remember that he was very introverted, depressed all the time and never talked to anyone. I always thought that he was not normal,” Abu Sedra said.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/suspect-linked-to-benghazi-kept-low-profile/feed/0Libya is on the brink of civil war, againhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libya-in-on-the-brink-of-civil-war-again/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libya-in-on-the-brink-of-civil-war-again/#commentsMon, 16 Jun 2014 15:31:46 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=566803In the wake of the NATO bombings that ousted Gadhafi, a new divisive force emerges

In the early days of the Arab Spring, according to a Libyan diplomat, Tunisians would mock Libyans by admonishing their neighbours to the east to keep their heads down so that they, in Tunisia, could have an unobstructed view of the real revolutionaries in Egypt, who had risen up against the long autocracy of Hosni Mubarak.

The barb stung, but only briefly. Libyans soon did take to the streets against their dictatorial ruler, Moammar Gadhafi—and when they did so, the costs were steeper than anywhere else in the rebellious Arab world except Syria. Gadhafi vowed to crush the challenge to his rule, and a civil war ensued with NATO throwing its air power, including Canadian fighter jets, behind the rebels. By the time Gadhafi was toppled in October 2011, more than 10,000 Libyans had died.

Such a price for victory might have galvanized a collective desire to unify and rebuild and, while many Libyans tried to do exactly that, the country has been plagued by divisions and competing power struggles that have kept Libya fragile and unstable ever since. Its parliament, the General National Congress, is weak. There have been three prime ministers since March. Independent militias are powerful and control large chunks of territory. There is an active federalist movement that wants greater autonomy, if not outright independence, for eastern Libya. And there is a gulf that separates—broadly speaking—Islamists from their more secular opponents.

Now a new force has entered Libya’s chaotic political arena, widening that gulf, sparking the most deadly fighting since the end of the civil war—and, quite possibly, making an attempt to run the country.

Khalifa Haftar is a former military commander who served under Gadhafi and led troops during the Chadian-Libyan conflict, a series of clashes in the 1970s and ’80s. Captured by Chadian forces in 1987, he defected to Libya’s opposition and moved to America. Much about his life in the following years is murky. He lived in Langley, Va., and may have co-operated with the CIA in its attempts to undermine Gadhafi. There are unconfirmed reports that he took part in a failed 1996 uprising in eastern Libya. Haftar returned to Libya in 2011 to join the civil war against Gadhafi. He did not emerge from that conflict as an obvious leader.

Then, this February, Haftar appeared on television, calling for the suspension of government, in what may have been a clumsy attempt at a coup. Few paid much attention. Haftar was ordered arrested, but escaped to eastern Libya.

His reappearance on Libya’s political scene last month was explosive. Haftar had secured backing from elements of Libya’s military, including special forces, as well as anti-Islamist tribal militias. This loose coalition launched air and ground assaults on Islamist militia bases in Benghazi, Libya’s main city in the east, on May 16, killing about 70 people. Allied militias in the capital, Tripoli, attacked Libya’s parliament two days later, killing two.

Haftar calls his ongoing campaign “Operation Dignity” and says its target is terrorism. In practical terms, this means Islamist militias and their ideological partners, whom he says have infiltrated parliament. Haftar says he does not seek power himself, but would stand for president “if asked” by the Libyan people.

Haftar’s support is difficult to gauge. Insecurity in Libya has reached a point where some Libyans are willing to back a strongman who promises order. Senior military officers have come to his side, as has former prime minister Ali Zeidan, a liberal who was sacked by the General National Congress in March. Egypt, now led by the anti-Islamist former general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, would be a natural ally, but has not intervened. Haftar denies any sort of outside assistance.

Jason Pack, a Libya analyst and researcher at Cambridge University, cautions that some of those who support Haftar do so because of his claim to lead Libya’s anti-Islamist bloc, not because of any regard they hold for him personally.

For the moment, though, Libya is polarizing, and Haftar’s rhetoric risks intensifying that process. “The most disturbing picture is this introduction of a narrative of a war on terror, that the space for actual opposition is closing and all Islamists of all stripes are being tarred as extremists or jihadists or al-Qaeda,” says Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There are radical jihadists in Libya who have benefited from its post-revolution disorder. Among them were those who assaulted the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi and a nearby CIA building in September 2012, killing four Americans, including ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.

“Those individuals probably need to be dealt with through arrests, rendition or kinetic [air] strikes,” says Wehrey. “But [we] just want to make sure that we’re not rolling other people into that category. To say, as some in Washington have said, that this country has fallen to extremists, or that the government is penetrated by extremists, is disingenuous.”

Haftar does not appear overly interested in such distinctions, nor in a negotiated peace: “We see that confrontation is the solution. What is the discussion? They are armed. I do not think that talks will work with them,” he said in a recent interview with the Washington Post.

Haftar’s uprising also presents a dilemma to Libya’s Western allies who have agreed to help train its military. More than 300 Libyan soldiers were scheduled to arrive in Britain this week to begin a 24-week course. Hundreds more have already been trained in Turkey and Italy. The United States is planning to train Libyan personnel at bases in Bulgaria. “We’re dealing with a military that has basically turned on itself,” says Wehrey. “If we start training Haftar’s factions, we’re implicitly endorsing a very dangerous drift toward something resembling a coup, or this authoritarian drift.”

Canada is not taking part in the international military training mission. A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development says “efforts are under way” to deploy five Canadian police officers to work with their Libyan counterparts through the United Nations Support Mission in Libya.

Pack argues that Libya’s foreign allies should continue to engage in Libya by helping it to build state institutions, including competent armed forces. Not doing so because of the instability buffeting the country will only weaken the foundation on which a functional central government might one day stand.

There are reasons to be optimistic that Libya will achieve such an outcome. The country does not have the same sectarian or ethnic divisions that have frayed places such as Iraq or Syria, and most Libyans have a shared sense of statehood, says Wehrey. “There is intermarriage between regions and tribes. It’s a very small place, and everybody seems to be five people removed from their neighbour, so that has certainly helped keep the country from going over the brink.”

Libyans, however, are rebuilding their country virtually from scratch. Gadhafi was an absolute dictator and, when he was gone, there was little in the way of institutional scaffolding to keep the state from crumbling. His ouster may prove to be the easy part in creating a stable, democratic country.

]]>TRIPOLI, Libya – A Defence Ministry official says Libya’s navy has prevented a Malta-flagged oil tanker from entering its territorial waters apparently en route to a militia that has shut down oil terminals for months in a challenge to the government.

Spokesman Abdul-Razak al-Shabahi told The Associated Press on Monday that the tanker tried to enter the northeastern city of Misrata’s port the previous night. He says the tanker and its cargo were not meant for the government.

Libya’s eastern militia is demanding more autonomy from the government in Tripoli and a share of oil revenues. Last summer, its fighters shut down most of the country’s terminals and mediation has failed.

The government has threatened to use force if the militia attempts to bring in oil before the standoff is resolved.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libyan-navy-intercepts-oil-tanker-apparently-headed-for-port-controlled-by-militia/feed/0Canada considers re-engaging in Libyahttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada-considers-re-engaging-in-libya/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada-considers-re-engaging-in-libya/#commentsWed, 04 Dec 2013 18:57:02 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=446045The United States, Italy, Britain, and Turkey have agreed to train thousands of Libyan troops to counter the instability caused by the numerous and often opposing militias that remain powerful…

]]>The United States, Italy, Britain, and Turkey have agreed to train thousands of Libyan troops to counter the instability caused by the numerous and often opposing militias that remain powerful there more than two years after the overthrow of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The United States will conduct its training in Bulgaria. Britain, Italy, and Turkey will theirs in their own countries. It is expected that current militia members will be among the recruits, although the United States will vet names supplied by the Libyan Defence Ministry to exclude hard-line Islamists.

Canada, which played an active role in the armed uprising against Gadhafi’s regime, has not said it will take part in this training mission. But Jean-Bruno Villeneuve, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, says Canada is “considering other ways to help further Libyan security sector reform.”

It would not be the first time Canada has tried to bolster Libya’s new government since NATO competed its military intervention there in 2011. Between 2011 and 2013, Foreign Affairs funded a program through the NGO CANADEM to send 11 civilian advisors to Libya to work in various government departments, including the defence and interior ministries.

“The aim of all of our security sector reform projects was to build capacity or help the ministries develop policy that would enable the Gov’t of Libya to absorb and retrain a greater number of revolutionaries into the police and the armed forces,” Christine Vincent, deputy executive director of CANADEM wrote in an email to Maclean’s.

The program, which cost DFATD 750 thousand dollars, ended in March. CANADEM, in conjunction with a couple of other agencies, has applied to DFATD for funding to do further work in Libya and expects a response shortly.

Fathi Baja, Libya’s new ambassador to Canada, says a lack of security is the “main concern” of his government and said he will ask Canada to help Libya rebuild its army and police forces.

Baja, a former political science professor at the University of Benghazi, says he also hopes Canada can help Libya develop its civil society, perhaps by training Libyan youth and other leaders at schools here.

The smothering and all-encompassing nature of Gadhafi’s long rule crippled the development of even rudimentary democracy or well-functioning government institutions in Libya, Baja says.

“We need members who understand the role of parliament, how you form committees inside it, how to make this legislative body work in a good way. We need that. We never had it before. I believe Canada can participate I this, can train Libyans in this matter.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada-considers-re-engaging-in-libya/feed/8Libya: ‘There is no easy way out’http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libya-there-is-no-easy-way-out/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/libya-there-is-no-easy-way-out/#commentsThu, 19 Sep 2013 13:11:00 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=423963Held up as one of the success stories of the Arab Spring, Libya has taken a turn to chaos

For almost two months now, the gunmen have brought Libya’s economy to a dead halt. One group of disgruntled tribesmen in the west have seized control of the major oil fields, and another set of strikers, protesters and militiamen are blockading the oil terminals along the eastern coast. Their demands are diverse—greater regional autonomy, an end to corruption, better pay, more jobs—but their effect singular. Oil production has dropped by more than 90 per cent, and exports—the cash generator that provides two-thirds of state revenues and keeps the central government afloat—went from 830,000 barrels a day in July, to a low of 80,000 per day in early September.

The country’s highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti, declared that disruptions of Libya’s oil industry, for any reason whatsoever, are a “grave sin.” Prime Minister Ali Zeidan has tried blandishments—pushing through a 20 per cent raise for employees of the national oil company—and veiled threats. “I hope that we won’t be forced to do something that we don’t want,” he told reporters in Tripoli last week. “But I won’t let anyone hold Libya and its resources hostage to irresponsible acts of these groups for long.” Although lacking a proper army, and stuck with an undermanned and outgunned police force, it’s hard to see how he could back up the tough talk.

As the second anniversary of the fall of Moammar Gadhafi approaches, Libya’s future is looking more and more precarious. Months of squabbling over legislation to bar the former dictator’s followers from public life has left the already fragile interim government deeply divided. In many parts of the country, the armed groups that led the bloody eight-month revolution remain laws unto themselves. Public frustration at the slow pace of reform and a general lack of services—including health care, education, and power—mushrooms by the day. And the favoured form of political protest has become the small siege.

Last spring, the Revolutionary Brigades—the new quasi-army formed from militias that the government has promised to put on the payroll—turned its guns on the General National Congress, forcing legislators to temporarily suspend their activities. Then they blockaded the ministries of justice, the interior and foreign affairs for more than two weeks, all to push for even tougher sanctions against those who once worked for Gadhafi. In June, there were two days of fierce fighting between rival militias in the streets of Tripoli, followed by a series of car bombings, in both the capital and the eastern city of Benghazi. In early September, Tripoli’s water supply was cut off for 10 days when members of the Magraha tribe—upset over the kidnapping of one of their kinswomen—shut down a pumping station at the source, several hundred kilometres to the south. Weary residents survived on bottled water, and pumped out their air conditioners in order to flush toilets.

“The continuing volatile security situation in Libya in general, and in the eastern and southern parts of the country in particular, is a source of grave concern,” a United Nations report to the Security Council warned last week. Government officials and buildings have come under attack, as have foreign diplomats and embassies. The stumbling economy and lack of tangible improvements in people’s daily lives are fuelling an angry and increasingly polarized political culture. The country’s “insecurity should not be underestimated,” says the UN, urging the government to make the protection of civilians and rule of law “a national priority.”

Held up as one of the great success stories of the Arab Spring following its free and peaceful elections in the summer of 2012, and the victory of a liberal coalition, Libya has taken a sudden turn toward chaos. “I don’t believe that it’s a real failure scenario yet,” says Sir Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador and head of the Libya Working Group at Chatham House, a U.K. think tank. “But in the last six months, it’s become increasingly unstable.” Local disputes and conflicts are now being played out on the national stage, eroding the already slow progress of the central government. “It’s really been their failure to come to grips with the security issue and monopolize force,” says Dalton. “There are large spaces in the country that the government doesn’t control.”

Magdalena Mugrabhi, one of Amnesty International’s representatives in Libya, says there are no lack of good intentions on the part of the government. “At the highest level, the authorities are committed to the improvement of the security and the human rights situation.” But the after-effects of the 42-year dictatorship, and the drive to keep anyone who was even remotely associated with the Gadhafi era out of positions of responsibility, have left a huge knowledge gap. She cites the example of the judicial police—charged with guarding and transferring prisoners and providing security for the courts. Stripped of its old leadership and officers, the force is now about half of its pre-conflict size, and almost entirely made up of former revolutionaries. “They don’t know how to deal with detainees, and they have had little or no training in police work,” says Mugrabhi. With some 8,000 people currently in jail—mostly members of the old regime—it’s proving to be a serious problem.

For the last two years, the Western governments that helped ensure the success of the revolution via air power have taken a generally hands-off approach to the country, preferring to let Libyans solve their own problems. But that may soon change. The oil shutdown is the biggest challenge the shaky Zeidan government has ever faced, and it’s costing state coffers more than $130 million in lost revenue each day; $7.5 billion in total so far. “The government pays the militias with that revenue,” says Frederic Wehrey, a Libya expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “So the use of oil as a political weapon is a real turn for the worse.”

There are suggestions that a negotiated end to the crisis is getting closer. Last week, production resumed at one large field, and workers were busy inspecting equipment at another. There were also reports of a tentative agreement with the occupiers of three export terminals. But even if that proves true, it will take months for the country to ramp production back up to the 1.4 million barrels a day that were being produced this past spring. During a quick trip to London to meet with donors and investors, Libya’s prime minister made a plea for more boots-on-the-ground aid. “If the international community does not help in the collection of arms and ammunition, if we don’t get help in forming the army and the police, things are going to take very long,” said Zeidan. “The situation is not going to improve unless we get real and practical assistance.”

Blessed with an abundant resource, and an educated and urban population, Libya seems an unlikely candidate to become a failed state like Somalia. And despite the well-publicized attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi last year and the death of ambassador Chris Stevens, there is little evidence that Islamists are gaining ground. For the most part, the militias remain focused on money and politics rather than religion. And as Wehrey notes, despite the regional squabbles there remains a strong national desire to see the sacrifices of the revolution validated by the creation of a better country. It’s just that the road forward has proven a lot rougher than people first imagined. “It’s a Herculean task to really escape from 42 years of tyrannical rule, where there were no institutions,” he says. “There is no easy way out.”

Although at present, Libyans would simply settle for someone who can keep the lights on, and the taps—for both oil and water—open.

]]>This afternoon I put that question to the Prime Minister’s Office: Will the government seek to recall the House for a vote before proceeding with any intervention in Syria?

In response I was told that, “It is premature to discuss recalling Parliament at this time.”

Even if it is premature to discuss recalling Parliament, it is hopefully not premature to speculate about doing so.

First, the precedents.

Following the Conservative party’s election pledge to “make Parliament responsible for exercising oversight over the conduct of Canadian foreign policy and the commitment of Canadian Forces to foreign operations,” the House voted in 2006 and 2008 to extend this country’s mission in Afghanistan. But, in 2010, the Prime Minister decided that the House didn’t need to vote on participating in a “technical or training missions,” only “combat” missions.

In regards to the bombing of Libya, the House of Commons voted in March 2011 to endorse the mission and the House voted to extend that mission in June 2011 and September 2011.

Of course, we do not yet know whether something is about to happen in Syria, whether Canada will participate whatever that is and how Canada might participate if we do.

Thomas Mulcair was asked yesterday whether he thought Parliament should debate Canada’s role and he linked recalling Parliament to any intervention.

Well, if there is any thought of an intervention, of course Parliament has to be reconvened. It’s a clear undertaking of Mr. Harper, but we have no indication in that direction right now.

Note that though the Prime Minister has said he will seek to prorogue Parliament this fall, he hasn’t actually gone ahead and done so yet and so Parliament could be recalled without going through the trouble of a Throne Speech.

Meanwhile, in Britain, where it is apparently not yet premature to discuss these things (possibly owing to the differences of time zones, I guess) Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that the House of Commons will be recalled for Thursday to debate and then vote on intervention in Syria.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/will-the-house-of-commons-be-recalled-to-vote-on-syria/feed/8Militias attack gas complex in western Libyahttp://www.macleans.ca/general/militias-attack-gas-complex-western-libya/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/militias-attack-gas-complex-western-libya/#respondMon, 20 May 2013 16:02:07 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=385552TRIPOLI, Libya – A Libyan gas company official says militiamen have attacked a natural gas complex in the country’s west, injuring two guards and stealing weapons and military vehicles.
The…

]]>TRIPOLI, Libya – A Libyan gas company official says militiamen have attacked a natural gas complex in the country’s west, injuring two guards and stealing weapons and military vehicles.

The official says the attack took place early Monday and targeted the Mellitah Oil and Gas complex near Zwara, about 110 kilometres (70 miles) from the capital, Tripoli. The complex is a joint venture between Libya’s National Oil Corp. and Italy’s largest energy company, Eni SpA. The militiamen fled the site briefly after seizing weapons and equipment from the guards.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.

A military official told Libya’s official news agency that military helicopters are searching for the attackers.

Over a year after toppling Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, Libya is plagued by lawlessness.

It’s been just over a year since Moammar Gadhafi was killed in Libya, bringing his violent, 40-year dictatorship to a sudden, brutal end. While the newly liberated country is still recovering from civil war and political unrest, some Libyan entrepreneurs are taking advantage of their new-found freedom—and for many, life is sweet. For the first time since economic sanctions were imposed in the early ’90s, the former Italian colony is finally indulging in the food it missed most—ice cream.

During the later Gadhafi years, it was almost impossible to acquire street-trading licences, and even more difficult to purchase the equipment and necessary ingredients from Europe. But since 2011, dozens of Italian-style ice cream shops have sprung up across the country. Every day, hundreds of Libyans brave long lines for brand-name flavours including Snickers and Nutella, and ice cream trucks are now common sights in city streets.

“There’s a market for it here,” Hussein Bannour, a gelateria owner from Tripoli, told the BBC. “Libyans are proud of things like this because we didn’t have it before.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/getting-their-just-desserts/feed/1Canada urges citizens to get out of Benghazi because of terror threatshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/canada-urges-citizens-to-get-out-of-benghazi-because-of-terror-threats/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/canada-urges-citizens-to-get-out-of-benghazi-because-of-terror-threats/#respondFri, 25 Jan 2013 10:26:07 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=341903OTTAWA – Canada joined several European countries Thursday in urging its citizens to immediately leave the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi because of the fragile political situation there.
In an…

]]>OTTAWA – Canada joined several European countries Thursday in urging its citizens to immediately leave the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi because of the fragile political situation there.

In an advisory posted on its website, the Department of Foreign Affairs also warned against non-essential travel to the African country.

“There is heightened risk of terrorism throughout Libya, including in Benghazi,” it warned.

“Terrorist attacks could occur at any time and could target areas frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers.”

In addition to Benghazi, it said, the security situation in the town of Bani Walid and the regions of Sabha and Kufra is also precarious.

Earlier, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands warned of an imminent threat against westerners in Libya, days after a deadly hostage crisis in neighbouring Algeria. European officials said schools were among the potential targets.

The warnings came a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified to Congress about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

They also came as French troops battled al-Qaida-linked militants in the West African country of Mali, and followed the deaths of at least 37 foreign hostages seized by extremists in Algeria.

Canada is supporting the Mali mission with a military transport plane. Ottawa said Thursday the C-17 Globemaster would continue to ferry military equipment and vehicles between France and the Malian capital of Bamako until Feb. 15.

Chuck Hagel, President Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of defence, is a former Republican senator, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran and, according to some of his critics, unfit to lead America’s military because of his supposedly anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic views.

Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal, informs readers that prejudice, like cooking, has an “olfactory element” element to it, and the smell around Hagel is particularly ripe.

Hagel once said the “Jewish lobby” intimidates a lot of people in Washington. Stephens condemns this on the basis that the pro-Israel lobby is not exclusively Jewish, and because Jews are not a monolithic political bloc. Fair enough–but Stephens’ suggestion a few paragraphs later that Jewish Americans might want to re-consider their support for Obama because he’s no friend of Israel is built on the same assumption of Jewish groupthink.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham meanwhile says Hagel would be “the most antagonistic secretary of defence towards the state of Israel in our nation’s history.” The Emergency Committee for Israel, a lobby group, has taken out television ads claiming Hagel is “not a responsible option.”

These criticisms are largely rubbish. On issues that really matter to Israelis — military aid, for example — Hagel has been consistently supportive. The Washington Post has compiled a list of Hagel’s most controversial statements on Israel. Finding proof in them that he’s some sort of closet Israel-hater requires some determined eye squinting.

More importantly, this focus on Hagel and Israel distracts from some of his views that will likely be more consequential if his nomination is approved.

Chuck Hagel is neither a neo-con Republican, nor a liberal interventionist. He’d prefer to keep American troops at home and let the world sort out its own problems. He didn’t support intervention in Libya, even when it appeared pro-government forces were prepared to slaughter their civilian opponents. Obama described Hagel as someone who knows that war is “something we only do when it’s absolutely necessary.”

Hagel did vote in favour of the Iraq war. And before that he co-sponsored a bill that would have authorized sending American ground troops to Kosovo.

But Hagel’s support for the war in Iraq was fleeting. He, like Obama, opposed the troop surge into the country, calling it “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in the country since Vietnam.” He was wrong. The surge saved Iraq from completely falling apart and allowed Obama to withdraw American troops in a manner that didn’t reek of defeat and abandonment.

Obama himself said the surge in Iraq “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” This may have influenced his decision to pour thousands of troops into Afghanistan at the beginning of his presidency. Hagel opposed this, too. Fortunately for Hagel’s political prospects, Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan didn’t last that long. The President and Hagel are now in agreement that leaving Afghanistan is more important than helping to build it into something that might survive our departure.

Hagel has been called soft on Iran. He has argued against the use of military force in Iran, but changed his mind and now believes it is a viable option of last resort. He believes Iran should be engaged. So did Obama, years ago. It didn’t work, and the President has now moved on to ever-tighter sanctions. Hagel opposes these, which shows a lack of judgment — especially as sanctions, if successful, would make a military strike on Iran less likely.

Hagel has also argued for engagement with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs the Gaza Strip. This, too, has earned him scorn from the right. There is a case to be made for shunning the group. It blows up buses, oppresses Palestinians under its control, sends rockets against Israeli civilians, and is a barrier to any hopes for a negotiated two-state solution in Israel and Palestine. The credibility Hamas would gain from any sort of contact with the United States would bolster it, to the detriment of Fatah, the more moderate group that governs Palestinian areas of the West Bank.

Yet the fact remains that Israel has negotiated with Hamas when it considered it necessary. And according to a Hamas member I interviewed in 2008, the group had also been in contact with officials from the U.S. State Department during the George W. Bush presidency. This isn’t to say that engaging Hamas is wise — only that partisans who condemn the idea can be hypocrites.

Chuck Hagel is what’s often called a realist. I don’t particularly like the term because it implies a hard-headed wisdom that too often justifies American isolationism in the face of potential humanitarian disasters, such as during the uprising in Libya; and because I don’t think withdrawing from places like Afghanistan and hoping doing so won’t come back to haunt us, again, is all that realistic. But in this sense, Hagel’s views are aligned with Obama’s. The President believes America’s ability to shape the world is limited. Hagel isn’t going to counsel him otherwise.

One morning this session, at the start of parliamentary business, Elizabeth May and Liberal MP Frank Valeriote ran into each other in the House of Commons. They had both been there late the night before for a debate. Valeriote apparently assumed that May had had the misfortune to be assigned a morning shift in the House. “He looked at me and he was so tired he forgot that I didn’t have somebody ordering me around,” May recalls. “He said, ‘Oh jeez, did you get House duty again?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, my leader’s such a bitch.’ ”

The joke, of course, is that Elizabeth May is her own leader. And the truth is that Elizabeth May doesn’t have House duty. Because, rather than putting in periodic shifts in the House of Commons, May is rarely anywhere else. The House of Commons is her office. “By the time you look at all the things that it’s possible to do as a right as an individual MP, I think the question isn’t why do I spend so much time in the House,” she says, “it’s why don’t other MPs spend time in the House?”

***

A week after the American presidential election—a massive undertaking of money and technology that Barack Obama won with the assistance of behavioural scientists—Elizabeth May has just finished standing on a street corner in Victoria, waving at motorists as they drive to work. “It’s a nice, friendly thing to do,” she says. Plus there’s not much else a campaign can do between 7 and 9am.

She is being driven to another street corner, where she will wave at more cars, while she tries to explain why she is otherwise almost always found in her seat in the far left corner of the House of Commons. “Well, it’s the logical thing to do,” she says. “Everybody else calls it House duty and I just call it work.”

She had assumed that last year’s election would result in another minority parliament and had been thinking about what influence she could have in that circumstance as a lone Green MP. She was hoping she could advance the discussion of a coalition government. But then election night came and the television networks heralded the arrival of a majority government. “At that point I began rethinking everything. And that’s when I read O’Brien and Bosc cover to cover and began to consider what will be the pivot points from which one seat can create a lot of leverage,” she says. “And that means being in the House. Because your opportunity, for instance, to be heard, to speak on issues, to ensure that no bill goes by where the Green party view is not expressed in Hansard. I get one question a week in Question Period, but essentially there’s no limit on the numbers of time I can stand to speak in debates on legislation.”

Her officially allotted office, located in the Confederation Building at the foot of Parliament Hill, has been turned over to four staff members and 20 interns. She periodically steps out of the office to take a meeting or conduct an interview, but her seat near the translators is her base of operations. And that there is now a near-constant presence in Seat 309—like a human mace when the House is in session—compels her colleagues to take her into account, even if just in the smallest of ways: House leaders, she says, now make sure to run upcoming requests for unanimous consent by her before presenting them to the Speaker. “It was reinforced for me that I have to be in there as much as possible when there were some unanimous consent efforts that nearly slipped past me, where I really didn’t want to give consent,” she says. “And if I’m going to get the other parties to take seriously that they need to consult the Green party before they assume they have unanimous consent it has to be a plausible threat: that I’m actually there all the time and you’re not likely to slip by a unanimous consent motion.”

If, when she stands to speak, she is heckled, she returns to her seat and waits for the noise to stop. This fall she has risen to contribute to debates about free trade with Panana, a foreign investment deal with China, the Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests or Rights Act, oil spill prevention in the Arctic, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, the military justice system, immigration law and food inspection, while also introducing C-454, An Act respecting an All Buffleheads Day and beseeching the Speaker to rule on the parameters around the 15 minutes before Question Period reserved for one-minute statements by MPs. “I have had colleagues in civil society say, ‘If I were you I wouldn’t spend anytime in the House, it’s useless for you to be there, you should be criss-crossing the country building support for the Green party.’ But, again, that’s what I would do if I thought my primary responsibility was to the Green party. But I don’t. My primary responsibility is to the voters of Saanich-Gulf Islands who sent me to the House of Commons. And they do not want to find that they’ve elected someone who has used and, I think, abused the trust they’ve placed in me to be the best possible member of parliament for them and be a voice in the House of Commons to restore civility and respect and to push back on the heckling. I think it’s a big part of why I was elected and it’s a big part of what I want to do, that can’t be done while criss-crossing the country talking about partisan politics.”

Two weeks after the House convened last year for the 41st Parliament, May stood as the only vote against extending the country’s military mission in Libya. A year later she helped lead the fight against C-38, the omnibus budget bill. In the all-night vote marathon that followed, she was one of five MPs to be present for all 157 votes. As she cast the last opposition vote against the bill, she received a standing ovation from the MPs around her and she cried. (For the record, she did not require diapers to remain in the House for 23 consecutive hours without a break. “I drank very little water. I was judicious,” she says. “I figured I needed to have enough liquids to keep me from dying.” She had some experience in this regard: A decade earlier she’d been outside Centre Block, staging a 17-day hunger strike to protest the Sydney Tar Ponds.)

On the phone, May is like your cheerful, eccentric aunt. She is enthusiastic and effusive on almost all points. Her sentences are regularly footnoted as they’re spoken. “Put me down with Stanley Knowles,” she says of the former NDP MP who was given a seat at the clerk’s table when he retired after 16 years as the MP for Winnipeg Centre. “I think that if they let me sit there into my 80s, I’d sit there. I love parliamentary democracy. I am fascinated by procedure. I’m beside myself with the way things are slipping.” What follows then is a 524-word dissertation—stretching from the slightest breach of decorum to the profound questions of power at the heart of our system—on the state of parliamentary democracy in Ottawa.

“I know it sounds small, but you’re not supposed to have members of Parliament standing and waiting their turn because they know when they’re going to be called and they have their speech ready and they’ve got the little podium and they’ve got a written speech in front of them and they’re standing while someone else is speaking. No one is supposed to stand except the person that’s been recognized by the Speaker and until you’re recognized by the Speaker you’re not supposed to stand. I know these may seem like small points, but it’s indicative of a failure to recognize that the respect for traditions in the House of Commons may start with things like one person stands at a time and only when recognized by the Speaker. And as soon as the Speaker stands, the person who’s in full oratory flight is supposed to sit down. Those are things that when you ignore that you also can get away with having a prime minister who ignores all parliamentary tradition and prorogues—well, not all, because Sir John A. Macdonald did it once and then paid for it by losing power—but you’re not supposed to prorogue the House of Commons to avoid a political difficulty. So a failure to respect our traditions of Stephen Harper proroguing twice then launched into Dalton McGuinty proroguing. This is very unhealthy for democracy. Because we are a Westminster parliamentary democracy and tradition and if we don’t pay attention and respect Parliament, then we are allowing the Prime Minister’s Office, which doesn’t exist as an entity in our constitution, it’s not like the executive branch and the White House in the U.S. constitution—the notion of a Prime Minister’s Office as an entity in the machinery of government is simply an invention, but it’s like a cancerous growth. And as the Prime Minister’s Office grows, and this is a trend we started with Pierre Trudeau in a much more innocuous way, it’s not reached its apex, but if we don’t do anything to stop it, what else will the next prime minister do? And as the PMO grows into being the all-powerful decision-maker, leaving cabinet ministers, basically their job appears to be the primary public relations spokesperson for an area of policy they had nothing to do with developing, it’s dangerous to health of democracy. So respect for Parliament, to me, is synonymous with respect for democracy. And I respect Parliament and that’s where the work is happening. I respect … there’s very few ministers who actually, actually I can only think of one, who sit though parliamentary debate on their own bills. And that’s, and should I say for credit where credit’s due, Jason Kenney. When his bills are being debated and when I rise to criticize his legislation, he actually knows what I’m talking about and will make a reasoned defence of his own legislation. But for the most part, it’s like a ritualized form of theatre. And that’s dangerous. It’s not just a relic, sort of an anachronism, that we still have parliamentary democracy. That’s the system. And the problem is PMO, not Parliament.”

She could go on. And, in fact, she does as the conversation continues (for an extra 15 minutes beyond the allotted half hour after she and the person driving her go a bit off course).

Each party, she says, has its own version of the PMO: “people who are unelected, political, full-time strategists, who only care about winning and I don’t think they have a single strand of DNA in their being that cares about the good of the country as a whole.” The public never sees them, but these are the people, she says, who “call the shots.” “I don’t have any of that,” she says, “and as long as I’m leader of the Green party we never will.”

It is easier for her to say. She is, so far as the House of Commons is concerned, an independent MP. She is the leader of her party, but she is also its only elected member. She has no caucus to consider, no colleagues with whom she might clash. This doesn’t necessarily invalidate any of her concerns about the function and functioning of Parliament, the role of MPs and the balance of power. But it does provide her an entirely unique position from which she can survey Parliament and publicly pronounce on its fitness.

It is from this vantage point—literally Seat 309, but also figuratively Seat 309—that she makes her pitch. “Greens, when we’re a larger group in the House, will be able to demonstrate you can be a political party, you can adhere to the same values, and you can do it while respecting the role of Members of Parliament, not as non-entity nobodies who fill a space on behalf of their brand until the next time that there’s a sales pitch, but as actual thinking, conscientious, dedicated, community leaders,” she says. “And frankly, I would say that by far, like well over 90% of the current House of Commons fit that description of being thoughtful, dedicated and community-minded people who, because of the current tyranny of hyper-partisanship, spend their days taking orders and minding their Ps and Qs and deeply resenting it. People resent it to different degrees, but it’s not really what they signed up for.”

She is, of course, a politician—obviously and thoroughly. As sure as she will stand on a street corner in Victoria, she has something to sell and she needs people to believe in it, if even just a little bit. So maybe this is her angle. It could be that this is merely her opening. It could be that Parliament is merely a tool to further her political career. But all that could be true and maybe her larger point would still stand. “As long as Canadians are encouraged, and I think they are encouraged, to regard parliament as dysfunctional and uninteresting, then that means surrendering their own levers of power and saying, okay, we’ll let the people we didn’t elect run everything. You elected your MP. Your MP is accountable to you and should be accountable to no one else. And Canadians need to reclaim that.”

She is simultaneously running for Parliament and against the system. “I’m so liberated by my status,” she says. “I wouldn’t trade places with any other MP. The only MP I’d trade places with is the member for Calgary Southwest.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/elizabeth-may-the-parliamentarian-of-the-year/feed/12So much for the Arab Springhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/so-much-for-the-arab-spring/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/so-much-for-the-arab-spring/#commentsThu, 27 Sep 2012 13:30:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=295265Fraught with dangerous, unstable local politics. A spark can set the region aflame.

The Arab Spring once celebrated in Washington and other Western capitals turned nasty last week, souring the hopes of those who believed that overthrowing autocrats and holding elections would see a more stable relationship between the West and the Middle East, as well as a calmer region—one less given to eruptions and recriminations. The rage and violence ripping across the region, which claimed the lives in Benghazi of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans as well as dozens of protesters in Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan and Yemen, underscore how chaotic and unruly the Middle East is becoming, and just how easily jihadists can now foment upheaval. For U.S. policy-makers, it prompts a difficult question during an especially vitriolic race to the White House: what next?

The reaction in Tripoli on the morning that news of Stevens’s death broke was of stunned disbelief; most residents of the Libyan capital avoided the streets, preferring to stay close to the safety of home in such unpredictable times. “So sorry,” was the shamefaced, reflexive response on the streets when Americans—or any Westerners—were encountered. “This isn’t the true face of Libya,” said Ahmed Ahmeri, a 38-year-old father of two who owns a clothing store in the residential district of Gargaresh. “These people are a minority, fanatics.”

Stevens, who was fully integrated into the life of the city, was seen by many Libyans as “one of them.” And the country’s leaders wasted no time in condemning the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed him. Mohamed Al Magariaf, president of Libya’s national assembly, declared, “In the strongest possible words, in all languages, we condemn, reject and denounce what happened.” The country’s leadership respected Stevens, a strong supporter of the uprisings against Moammar Gadhafi; many counted him as a personal friend. The friendly, laid-back Californian could sometimes be spotted lunching or taking tea at favourite spots deep in the warren of streets that make up Tripoli’s ancient souk with no apparent security detail nearby. A well-known public figure, he felt “like one of the boys because of his role in the rebellion,” said a European ambassador sipping tea in his office overlooking Tripoli harbour. “He stood with us in Benghazi when everyone else was running away,” rebel leader Abdul Rahman El Mansouri explained. “Chris saved us,” Mansouri, a man not given to tears, added, dabbing his eyes.

For President Barack Obama, the widespread anti-American fury set off by an obscure, amateurish, Islamophobic film, Innocence of Muslims, depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a philanderer and fraud, poses one of the biggest foreign-policy crises of his administration, offering the chance for his rival in the U.S. presidential elections, Mitt Romney, to try to cast him as the second coming of Jimmy Carter, whose 1980 re-election was doomed by the Iranian hostage crisis.

Americans, who are in no mood to be asked for more foreign sacrifices, are sore and wondering why the U.S. bothered to back rebels in Libya and elsewhere during the Arab Spring if the rewards are the storming and besieging of U.S. missions, the burning of the American flag and the slaying of a U.S. ambassador—the first American envoy to be killed since the Carter administration. It was a response U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton anticipated when confirming that Stevens had died in the attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi: “How could this happen? How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction?” she said in an address in Washington last week. “This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.”

Confounding indeed. There was little understanding on the streets of Cairo when influential jihadist preachers, Islamist talk-show hosts and Salafist parties keen to outmanoeuvre the country’s Muslim Brotherhood government whipped up a frenzy over the tawdry film, prodding protesters to react violently. Four days of violent protests followed in Cairo, with protesters scaling the walls of the U.S. Embassy, shredding the American flag and replacing it with the black flag favoured by al-Qaeda. Copycat riots quickly spread across the region, from Tunisia in the west to the Arab Peninsula state of Yemen, but the most deadly for the Americans came in Libya.

Ordinary Libyans don’t like what they have woken up to either. There was a keen sense of loss among the young progressive activists who cluster around the café and terrace of central Tripoli’s Radisson Blu hotel this week. The progressives—the women tend to dress in hijab-chic, covering their head with a scarf but otherwise wearing tight-fitting clothes—were left wondering, as 20-year-old languages student Ensherah Ben Taboon put it, “What is our future?” She hopes that Libyans will rally in this moment of crisis. Still, they are doing little to try to get it back on track; there were no major demonstrations after Stevens’s death on the side of democracy or even on the side of stability. There were a few small-scale efforts: on Sept. 12, around 200 Libyans gathered to express anger at the assault. And yet even as democracy activists held up placards denouncing violence, Salafi infiltrators entered the square; “Islamic law supports an armed reaction when the Prophet is insulted,” said a bearded 29-year-old, who gave his name as Abu Essa and said he came from Derna. “That’s nonsense,” intervened a democracy activist. “The Quran doesn’t say you should kill innocents.” But such exchanges were isolated. Across the road in a packed outdoor café, the hookah-smoking male patrons who numbered about the same as the activists in the square watched the exchanges.

Despite unsupported claims that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was part of a sophisticated al-Qaeda plot, to Libyan progressives, the culprits are obvious: homegrown Salafists wanting to ensure that Libya remains a religiously conservative country. Progressives complain of the meddling of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, arguing that their preachers—“the unseen foreign hand pushing the Salafis,” according to Annaily al Housh, a 58-year-old doctor—are egging them on. And indeed, Wahhabi preachers based in Medina and funded by the Saudi state are becoming increasingly influential across the Arab Spring countries, with Saudi and Qatari money helping finance local Islamist parties.

But how big a part that played in the attacks remains a question. And there’s plenty of blame to be shared for the ambassador’s death, says Libyan government spokesman Mohamed Al-Akari: Stevens, he argues, shouldn’t have been in Benghazi in the week of the 9/11 anniversary. Only weeks earlier in the eastern Libyan city there had been a near assassination of the British ambassador, and in the early summer, a grenade was lobbed at a car carrying the UN envoy to Libya. Akari says Stevens should have been evacuated rapidly by his U.S. security detail when the anti-American riots started to unfold a few hours earlier in neighbouring Egypt. But he also admits that untrained and nervous Libyan interior ministry guards panicked when protesters started arriving and may have prompted the shootout by firing first.

The details will be lost on many Americans disgusted at the anti-U.S. rage, and on Republican politicians who want to establish in the voters’ minds the image of a weak President who should never have engaged with Islamist elected governments in Egypt and Tunisia in the first place. “It’s a pattern, and the pattern sees the U.S. with reduced influence, reduced respect, reduced capacity to project its interests,” Rich Williamson, a Romney adviser who accused Obama of not providing effective leadership in the Arab world, told Foreign Policy magazine.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s reluctant and tardy condemnation of the riots didn’t help Obama make the case that the U.S. needs to stay the course. When he did end his silence, he seemed keener to lash out at the movie for insulting the Prophet. A rankled Obama fired back, saying publicly he didn’t “consider [Egypt] an ally,” although, he added, “We don’t consider them an enemy,” either.

And that sums up the dilemma of the Arab Spring for America and the West: the governments that have so far emerged are neither friend nor foe. The democracies that are unfolding are troubled and fragile, fraught with dangerous and unstable local politics. They’re also at the centre of a behind-the-scenes struggle between the West and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia and Qatar for influence in the region.

Ironically, the Arab Spring country that saw the actual shedding of American blood was the one most disposed to the U.S. and the West—Libya. That goodwill is based partly on the education that an older generation of the Libyan elite received in North America—three of the main contenders for the premiership had been exiles in the U.S. or Canada—and partly on lingering gratitude for the U.S. intervention in last year’s rebellion. Thanks are still frequently expressed to Westerners encountered in the streets of Tripoli and even Benghazi by Libyans.

That affinity with the West runs through the economic vision of Libya’s newly elected Islamist Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur, a U.S.-trained scientist who spent more than 30 years in exile in America; listening to him laying out his plans for the new Libya is like encountering an American politician. “I want to change Libya by encouraging the private sector, building on the human capital of the young and encouraging their creative, entrepreneurial ideas, and to get rid of government subsidies,” he said. He believes creating the proper environment for the economy to grow will attract foreign investment. “I want to make the country very accessible. I’d like to change the regulatory system that makes it very difficult for people to set up businesses, and we need to reform our banking system, which is still in the Stone Age.”

But Libya won’t be the U.S. anytime soon, if ever—and neither will the other countries that have shed their dictators. And that is part of the problem when it comes to the dismay and disillusionment felt in the aftermath of last week’s rampages. Policy-makers and commentators were naive in viewing the Arab Spring as “just, democratic and liberal uprisings,” says Bill Lawrence, who directs the North Africa Project for the International Crisis Group and served in the U.S. State Department. They were too quick to see the protests through the prism of the Facebook or Twitter postings of young progressive dissidents, many exiled or foreign-educated. The political language of those young people was the West’s—democracy and freedom, women’s rights and free speech—but the Facebook dissidents, he says, were not representative of the uprisings; they were just one element in a big mix of forces that came together to express rage over hopeless economics, corruption and abusive government. And Islamists of all stripes were heavily involved. “This part of the world has been swept up in an Islamic revival,” says Lawrence. Few “appreciate how conservative these countries are in terms of religion.”

The demographics of the region suggest that one cause of turbulence—jobless young men—will long remain. Salafists will have an army of unemployed to recruit from. All the Arab Spring countries share two things: they have very young populations and they are unable to create jobs. For Libya, this is especially critical. Libyans are great consumers and traders, but aside from oil, they produce little. They are going to have to start, if they are to reduce their current 34 per cent unemployment rate. With more than 250,000 armed militia fighters, the need for action is urgent, the country’s new prime minister acknowledges. “They have power and can create a lot of mischief,” says Abushagur. “But there are no jobs for them. The only way we can grow this economy is by getting investment, but then we have to be able to provide security and stability and offer protection for people who want to set up businesses.”

Time is not on his side. Nor is it on the side of policy-makers in the West who believe that engagement must be maintained. As the anti-American riots unfolded, the isolationist wing of the Republican party seized the moment, with Republican Sen. Rand Paul reintroducing an amendment to end America’s $1.5-billion annual aid to Egypt and to cut off funding to Libya. Yet to retreat now would end any chance the West has of shaping or tempering the outcome of the Arab Spring. Says Lawrence: “We have to engage and spend more.” With the presidential election looming, and cash-strapped Americans anxious about their future and more interested in nation-building at home, that message is going to be a hard sell.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/stephen-harper-on-libya-iran-the-arab-spring-the-economy-and-the-budget/feed/17What Putin said to Harperhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-putin-said-to-harper/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/what-putin-said-to-harper/#commentsThu, 13 Sep 2012 20:48:02 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=293493David Akin reports details of the conversation between the Prime Minister and Vladimir Putin during last weekend’s summit.But none of this will surprise Russian President Vladimir Putin who as …

]]>David Akin reports details of the conversation between the Prime Minister and Vladimir Putin during last weekend’s summit.

But none of this will surprise Russian President Vladimir Putin who as much warned Prime Minister Stephen Harper during their one-on-one meeting in Vladivostok on the weekend that the West should expect this kind of thing for “instigating” mobs in Egypt and Libya. According to officials in the room with the two men, Putin said Harper and other Western leaders are acting like “Trotskyites” – that was Putin’s line — for exporting revolution and promoting instability.

I’m not sure how Putin connects the dots between Stephen Harper and Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, but Putin’s basic point to Harper was that Western leaders were being dangerously naive by meddling in the affairs of the dictators of the Middle East.

]]>One of the unnoticed footnotes to the crisis in Libya and Egypt that threatens to rock the U.S. presidential election is the reaction of Canadian political parties to the events of Tuesday and Wednesday. From the government: John Baird says Canada “strongly condemns and deeply regrets yesterday’s senseless attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.” From the NDP: Paul Dewar says New Democrats “unequivocally condemn this brutal and senseless act of terrorism.” From the Liberals, over the signature of Bob Rae: “We condemn this violent attack against the American mission, and support the Libyan government in its efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

There is nothing in any of the three main parties’ statements to match the subordinate clause that begins this sentence from U.S. President Barack Obama’s statement today: “While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”

An NDP spokesman was cross with me when I pointed out today on Twitter that there was no reference to “efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others” in the NDP statement. Nobody’s statement included such language, a transparent reference to the amateurish film that many rioters in Benghazi and Cairo are citing as a provocation. The NDP guy meant the NDP statement was identical to the Liberals’ and the Conservatives, and that’s true. But indeed I cannot find any such reference to denigrating others’ beliefs in the statements from David Cameron, François Hollande, and Germany’s foreign minister.

So the only editorial comment on the motives of the mobs that I found in this quick survey comes from the U.S. President. And check the link: I’m not talking about last night’s disputed and disowned tweets from the Cairo embassy, I’m talking about today’s official statement by the President.

Anyway. Discuss. Meanwhile things are moving very quickly across the region where Obama gave his first major foreign-policy speech as President less than four years ago. The speech carried a title, “A New Beginning,” and that’s what the last few days have felt like, but in a more foreboding way than Obama intended. He’s got what looks like an organized ambush against U.S. personnel in Benghazi; an Egyptian president who’s more upset about the film than about the siege against the U.S. embassy in Cairo; an Afghan president with the same reflexes; fraying relations with the Israeli PM, who seems for all the world to be attempting to ensure Obama loses in November. Just about the only good news for him this week is Mitt Romney’s response to the chaos.

But while Romney was wrong on facts and graceless in manner, his instinct — that a “yes, but” is not the right response to the Benghazi slaughter, that “we didn’t like the film either, but you shouldn’t kill over it” gives the mob too much credit and the notion of free speech too little — was widely shared today. The makers of Innocence of Muslims are Americans, so perhaps they are a problem only Obama needed to address. But only he did; his contemporaries, from Germany to the Office of the Leader of the Opposition in Ottawa, steered clear.

UPDATE: A Reader on Twitter points out that Obama does have some company, but it’s not in other countries this week, it’s in the same country not long ago: During rioting over the Danish cartoons in 2006, the Bush administration sought to defend free speech and condemn violent fanatacism while also criticizing the cartoons: “We find them offensive,” a State Dept. spokesman said, while defending Danish newspapers’ right to run them.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/benghazi-glen-ross/feed/98Updated: Baird condemns ‘senseless’ killing of U.S. ambassadorhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/baird-condemns-senseless-killing-of-u-s-ambassador/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/baird-condemns-senseless-killing-of-u-s-ambassador/#commentsWed, 12 Sep 2012 15:22:59 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=292542OTTAWA - Attacks on a U.S. consulate in eastern Libya that killed the American ambassador and three of his staff were "senseless," Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said Wednesday.

]]>OTTAWA – Canada is reviewing the security situation at its embassy in the Libyan capital of Tripoli in the wake of the killing of American diplomats in the eastern city of Benghazi, says Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

“As you would expect, we’ll re-evaluate the environment as we regularly do for our personnel in Tripoli,” Baird said Wednesday from India, where he was on an official visit.

Baird spoke after extremists killed the American ambassador and three of his staff at a U.S. diplomatic post in eastern Libya.

“It’s an attack on diplomacy,” he said, adding that Foreign Affairs continually updates the security environment for Canadian personnel.

Baird said those responsible must be brought to justice.

Baird visited Benghazi in June 2011, shortly after the uprising in the north African country that resulted in the ouster and death of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

He returned to Tripoli in October 2011 to reopen the Canadian embassy, which had been closed for nine months after Canada joined NATO countries in launching air attacks on Libya to back rebel fighters trying to remove Gadhafi.

“Canada strongly condemns and deeply regrets yesterday’s senseless attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya,” the minister said in a brief, strongly worded statement.

“We call upon Libyan authorities to take all necessary measures to protect diplomatic premises in accordance with Libya’s international obligations. We also urge Libyan officials to ensure the extremists responsible are brought to swift justice.”

Defence Minister Peter MacKay called the attack “an act of violence that shocks us all.”

“Canada, of course, has a vested interest in ensuring that we see security and a greater sense of stability spread within Libya,” MacKay said.

“And we recommit ourselves and dedicate ourselves to that effort.”

Ambassador Chris Stevens, 52, and three colleagues were killed when a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff.

One of the dead diplomats formerly served in the American consulate in Montreal.

“We grieve particularly for the death of information management officer Sean Smith,” David Jacobson, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, said in a statement.

“Sean recently served at the U.S. consulate in Montreal. He and his family were a part of our mission family, and we extend to them our deepest condolences and sympathy.

“Each of us in the U.S. mission in Canada was shocked and saddened to learn of the deaths of our colleagues in Libya following the outrageous attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.”

Jacobson said Americans appreciate the support coming from the Canadian government and people.

Smith, described in reports as an online gaming enthusiast, was remembered fondly by one former State Department colleague as a devoted family man.

“He was a friend from the consulate and our children played often together when we were in Montreal,” said the fellow diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, calling Smith “a devoted father of his two children and a generous and committed U.S. diplomat.”

U.S. President Barack Obama condemned the attacks and ordered increased security at American diplomatic posts around the world.

Obama named Stevens and Smith, but said the families of their two fallen colleagues were still being notified.

“We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done,” Obama said.

The assault occurred Tuesday night in the eastern city of Benghazi when protesters with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades stormed the consulate in what officials say was an angry response to a short film that ridiculed Islam and its founder, Muhammad.

Ambassador Chris Stevens, 52, and three colleagues were killed when a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed the deaths on a “small and savage group” of militants, and said the attack should “shock the conscience of people of all faiths around the world.”

Stevens is the first U.S. ambassador to be killed in an attack since 1979, when Ambassador Adolph Dubs was killed in Afghanistan.

On its website, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department is urging Canadians to avoid all travel to Libya, except for Tripoli and the Benghazi area, where only essential travel is recommended.

It was unclear Wednesday whether that advisory would be amended as a result of the attacks.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/baird-condemns-senseless-killing-of-u-s-ambassador/feed/1Obama condemns killing of U.S. envoyhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/u-s-ambassador-reported-dead-in-libya/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/u-s-ambassador-reported-dead-in-libya/#commentsWed, 12 Sep 2012 11:50:07 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=292477The U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed along with three of his staff.
Chris Stevens went to the U.S. consulate in Banghazi, Libya, Wednesday morning to check on the…

“Right now, the American people have the families of those we lost in our thoughts and prayer. They exemplified America’s commitment to freedom, justice, and partnership with nations and people around the globe, and stand in stark contrast to those who callously took their lives.”

The $5-million movie, Innocence of Muslims, claims Muhammad was a fraud. Bacile, a real estate developer, defines himself as an Israeli Jew and believes the movie will help Israel by exposes Islam’s flaws. Footage of the obscure film has been posted online, and Bacile has since gone into hiding.

Prompted by the Cairo protest, armed militants in Libya set the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on fire, killing one American. Looting at the consulate has been reported by Reuters.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/u-s-ambassador-reported-dead-in-libya/feed/2The thick of ithttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-thick-of-it-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-thick-of-it-2/#commentsThu, 26 Jul 2012 15:27:19 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=277168Stuck in the middle of a dispute over the cost of the Libya mission, defence officials apparently started work on a screenplay for a satirical comedy about the inner workings…

]]>Stuck in the middle of a dispute over the cost of the Libya mission, defence officials apparently started work on a screenplay for a satirical comedy about the inner workings of government communications.

“Unfortunately, the MND (minister of national defence) is now saying he did NOT know the cost estimates ($106M) when he did the CBC interview in October,” reads an email from senior public affairs adviser Lt.-Col. Norbert Cyr to Vance on May 15.

“This is not good because media are now asking who is saying the truth, the Minister or General Vance?”

“Wonderful,” Vance replied, adding: “Do we have an opinion on what MND knew or ought to have known?”

Cyr said finance officials were working to confirm what MacKay knew, but “bottom line is that if MND says he did not know, then he did not know.”

“If I was wrong I’ll certainly own up to it,” Vance replied.

“Not suggesting you are or were wrong,” Cyr answered in the last email of the chain. “A political truth can sometimes be different.”

No word as yet on whether any of the networks have expressed interest in the pilot.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-thick-of-it-2/feed/5Libyans elected pro-west leader, provisional figures showhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/libyans-elected-pro-west-leader-provisional-figures-show/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/libyans-elected-pro-west-leader-provisional-figures-show/#respondMon, 09 Jul 2012 15:19:24 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=272934Although the ballots are still being counted, provisional figures show that Libya has shut-out the Muslim Brotherhood in favour of interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril, head of the pro-west National…

]]>Although the ballots are still being counted, provisional figures show that Libya has shut-out the Muslim Brotherhood in favour of interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril, head of the pro-west National Forces Alliance.

Jibril is reported to have have won close to 80 per cent of the vote in Tripoli, with strong results in the south and 60 per cent in Benghazi. With a masters and doctorate from the University of Pittsburg, Jabril is a markedly different candidate from those who won elections in other countries that took part in the Arab Spring. Islamic governments have risen to power in both Egypt and Tunisia.

Libyans turned out in large numbers on Saturday to vote in the first free election since 1969. Although some violence was reported on Saturday, the election process was largely peaceful.

On Monday morning, Jibril called for all of the nearly 60 parties participating in the election to come together in one grand coalition for the sake of national unity. Jabril has previously rejected descriptions of his NFA as secular and liberal, saying a commitment to Islamic law is one of the party’s core principles.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/libyans-elected-pro-west-leader-provisional-figures-show/feed/0Libyans in Canada go to the pollshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/libyans-in-canada-go-to-the-polls/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/libyans-in-canada-go-to-the-polls/#respondWed, 04 Jul 2012 15:07:54 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=271880A small group of Canadians are headed to the polls today, but they are taking part in no ordinary election.
Libyan-Canadians across the country are casting their ballots ahead of…

]]>A small group of Canadians are headed to the polls today, but they are taking part in no ordinary election.

Libyan-Canadians across the country are casting their ballots ahead of the Libyan national election, which will be held this weekend to pick a new national assembly in the formerly embattled country.

This is the first time Libyans have gone to the polls since Muammar Gaddafi came to power in 1969. A new 200-member assembly will be chosen from 2,500 candidates who represent 142 political parties.

The election carries extra historical significance as the new assembly will be tasked with writing Libya’s constitution.

Canada is one of only six countries where citizens originally from Libya have the ability to vote for the new government. Libyans in Canada, the United States, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Great Britain were invited to vote due to their countries’ contributions to the uprising which ousted Gaddafi in 2011.

Market stalls are loaded with fresh vegetables and fruit and stores well stocked in Tripoli, but, politically, the country is still staring at the abyss. Photograph: Jamie Dettmer

TRIPOLI — At the ripe age of 118, Nuwara Faraj Fahajan has become the poster-child of Libya’s upcoming general elections. Photographers from all over the world snapped frantically when she held up her registration card after signing up to vote in the town of Zliten, some 100 kilometres east of Tripoli.

It is anyone’s guess, though, whether the frail centenarian will still be around when the country actually picks its new leader.

Libya’s election commission has recently announced voting initially slated for June 19 may be delayed by several weeks. And even those elections would merely pick a constituent assembly to replace the current transitional leadership and oversee the drafting of a new constitution.

The time when Libyans will choose a new president and parliament is still months away, and an air of uncertainty is hanging over the country.

Freedom has brought a few immediate, tangible benefits, of course. Stores in Tripoli are well stocked with everything from Italian fashions to the latest Apple gizmos and new shops are opening all over the city. Market stalls near the souk are loaded with fresh vegetables and fruit, and nightly gunfire has become a rarity. And newspapers and magazines are sprouting up all over the country, although reporting standards still leave a lot to be desired and most outlets seem far too cautious. (Little ink has been spilled over plight of the 70,000-some displaced Libyans, rumors of torture and abuse in rebels-run detention centres, or the clashes still ongoing in the south of the country.)

In many ways, Libya still feels frighteningly frail. The current, unelected transitional government has raised eyebrows by issuing laws that were rescinded the following day only to be re-issued again, in some cases. And some of those pieces of legislation have caused alarm. One such law meant to grant immunity to rebels for acts committed during the insurrection is so broadly written western diplomats worry it reads like a blanket amnesty that would forgive even egregious crimes such as the killing unarmed civilians. Another one, which Amnesty International researcher Diana Eltahawi says encourages “carte blanche abuse,” instructs courts to accept as evidence confessions extracted through torture.

There’s also the so-called “glorification” legislation, which makes it an offence punishable with up to life imprisonment to praise the defunct regime of Col. Moammar Gadhafi or condemn the revolution that ousted him. As a result of that, schools across the country have stopped teaching modern Libyan history in an attempt to steer clear of trouble. “We are meant to pretend like it never happened and my principal is adamant that 42 years of Libyan history should be erased,” says a 38-year-old teacher, who asked not to be named. “People feel they are walking a thin line,” she adds.

That Libya’s political landscape is still in flux makes walking that thin line all the more complicated. Regional militias and local military councils of varying ideological stripes are vying to define the new order with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, a favourite at the polls, and a multitude of progressive NGOs and civil society groups that have mushroomed since the toppling of Gadhafi. And then, of course, the old regime’s business and administrative elite– nicknamed disparagingly “the climbers” by ordinary Libyans—who did quite well under the defunct dictator and would like to keep it that way.

As Hussam Hussein Zagaar, director of a local a media development NGO, put it: “In some ways it was easier during the revolution: All we had to do then was focus on getting rid of Gaddafi. Now we have to think about what comes next.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/in-post-gadhafi-libya-life-still-feels-frighteningly-frail/feed/7Tripoli vs. The Hague: two courts vie to try Gadhafi’s sonhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/tripoli-vs-the-hague-two-courts-vie-to-try-gadhafis-son/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/tripoli-vs-the-hague-two-courts-vie-to-try-gadhafis-son/#commentsWed, 23 May 2012 15:58:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=258958Libya and the International Criminal Court are at war—over who gets to stage a trial for Saif al-Islam Gadhafi

Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son and once presumed heir of deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, says he would rather face the death penalty from a trial in Libya than be tried in an international court that would spare his life.

The International Criminal Court has charged Gadhafi with crimes against humanity related to his alleged role in the suppression of last year’s uprising against his father’s regime. It has ordered Libya’s National Transitional Council to surrender him into its custody in The Hague, in the Netherlands. But the Libyan government insists it will try Gadhafi, and has asked the international court to drop its case against him and his co-accused, former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi, who is now in Mauritania.

Gadhafi sided with the former rebels he once described as “drunkards and thugs” when ICC investigators visited him in Zintan last month; he has been held by an anti-regime militia in the tiny Libyan city since they caught him apparently trying to flee to Niger. “I hope I can be tried here in my country, whether they execute me or not,” he reportedly said.

Gadhafi’s comments might have been made to please his captors. A Libyan prosecutor was present at the time. But Gadhafi did not retract them when the prosecutor left the room. Gadhafi’s judicial fate, however, is not up to him. It will be decided in a legal argument between the ICC and Libya’s fledgling government.

The ICC’s official mandate is not to supplant local justice, but to take on cases in which national courts are unwilling or unable to try indicted individuals themselves. International trials provide a chance for justice that might not otherwise exist, but at a cost. The country where heinous crimes were committed avoids confronting its past, and the judicial process unfolds far from the victims. To critics, the ICC’s desire to try Gadhafi smacks of neo-colonialism, of Western interference in the affairs of a sovereign government trying to deliver justice to its citizens. But the court indicted Gadhafi in June, during the chaos of Libya’s civil war when the country was mostly ungoverned. In a submission to the court, the Libyan government said it “has no intention of shielding such individuals so as to allow impunity, or to hold a rushed trial of these two persons that would not meet international standards of due process. [The government] is committed to attaining the highest international standards both for the conduct of its investigations and any eventual trials. Achieving this outcome will contribute to judicial capacity-building and will provide Libya’s long-suffering people a unique opportunity to assume ownership over the past, to avoid impunity, and to build a better future based on respect for the rule of law and fundamental human rights.”

Amnesty International is not convinced a fair trial in Libya for Gadhafi is possible and has urged the government to surrender him to the ICC. “In the absence of a functioning Libyan court system and for as long as the Libyan justice system remains weak and unable to conduct effective investigations, the ICC will be crucial in delivering accountability in Libya,” Marek Marczynski, a spokesman for Amnesty International’s justice team, said in a statement.

Even if the Libyan government were willing to hand over Gadhafi, it’s unlikely it could currently do so without approval from the Zintan brigade that is holding him, but isn’t under its control. Libya says Gadhafi will soon be transferred to Tripoli, where they are building a special prison facility for him.

In the meantime, Libya is hoping to convince the ICC that it can hold a fair trial. Prime Minister Abdurrahim el-Keib said Libya is adopting new legislation that will incorporate crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide into Libyan law. He says Libya will liaise with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights regarding any technical assistance that the prosecutors and judiciary might require.

Libya has also hired several top international lawyers to argue on its behalf, including Payam Akhavan, a law professor at McGill University. “The question is whether the judicial system of a country like Libya, after 40 years of dictatorship and tremendous violence, is in a position to allow for a fair trial in accordance with international standards,” Akhavan said in a recent speech at the University of Ottawa. “This is a unique case because it revolves around the question of the ability—as opposed to the willingness—of states to bring such crimes before their own courts.”

Darryl Robinson, a former adviser to the ICC who teaches law at Queen’s University, believes Libya should be given the chance to prove it can deliver impartial justice and, if so, to try Gadhafi at home. “Local justice is close to the victims,” he said. “It’s the site where [the crimes] happened. Success for the ICC doesn’t have to be grabbing the case. Success for the ICC could be the fact that it induced a state to run a high-quality investigation and prosecution for the most serious international crimes.” An ICC decision on whether to proceed with the case is expected within weeks.